François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand was born in 1768 in Saint-Malo, Brittany, the youngest son of a noble but impoverished family. He spent a brooding adolescence in the ancestral chateau of Combourg before traveling to America, where encounters with the wilderness would profoundly shape his literary imagination. Returning to France during the Revolution, he fought briefly for the royalist cause, was wounded, and fled to England, where he lived in poverty for seven years. His literary career began with Atala and Rene, short novels that made him the most celebrated writer in France, and The Genius of Christianity, which helped rehabilitate Catholicism in post-revolutionary society. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Memoirs From Beyond the Grave.