Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot edited the Encyclopédie for twenty-five years, twenty-eight volumes and seventy thousand articles that gathered the knowledge of the age and were banned, suppressed and secretly mutilated by the printer, and he wrote, mostly for the drawer, the works that made him the most modern of the philosophes. Rameau’s Nephew, a dialogue with a parasite and musician’s nephew who defends his own corruption, was unknown until Goethe translated it from a manuscript in 1805; Jacques the Fatalist and D’Alembert’s Dream were likewise posthumous. Catherine the Great bought his library and let him keep it.