A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most
influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Candide, his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of
the theory that our world is the best of all possible worlds. The book traces the picaresque adventures of the
guileless Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved
Cunegonde, tortured by the Inquisition, et cetera, all without losing his resilience and will to live and pursue
a happy life. This Modern Library edition, published to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House,
is a facsimile of the first book ever released under the Random House colophon. It includes the timeless illustrations
by Rockwell Kent, a twentieth-century artist whose wit and genius serve as a counterpart and compliment to Voltaire's.