How to Live

A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Sarah Bakewell's biography approaches the life of Michel de Montaigne through twenty answers to the question of how to live. It follows his career as a sixteenth-century French nobleman, public official, and writer, while examining the essays that made him a central figure in modern thought. The book also traces how later readers and thinkers have interpreted and adapted Montaigne's ideas.

by Sarah Bakewell