Xavier de Maistre

(1763 - 1852)

The twenty-seven-year-old Xavier de Maistre began writing his Voyage Around My Room while under a forty-two-day house arrest for dueling. He did not think to publish it until his older brother printed it without the author’s consent in 1794. Susan Sontag called it “one of the most original and mettlesome autobiographical narratives ever written.”