“The True Adventures of His Life”: A Centenary Celebration for Victor Brombert

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University and the author of many books including In Praise of Antiheroes, Musings on Mortality, and Stendhal. His most recent publication, The Pensive Citadel, will be released in October 2023 by The University of Chicago Press. In The Pensive Citadel, Victor Brombert looks back on a lifetime of learning within a university world greatly altered since he entered Yale on the GI Bill in the 1940s. Yet for all that has changed, much of Brombert’s long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: the rewards of rereading, the joy of learning from students, and most of all the insight to be found in engaging works of literature. The essays gathered here range from meditations on laughter and jealousy to new appreciations of Brombert’s lifelong companions Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Stendhal. Foreword by Christy Wampole.