This is the first volume of Chateaubriand's Memoires d'Outre Tombe, in a Victorian translation. It covers the period from his birth, including the extraordinarily evocative childhood years and his travels in America, the source of some of his later writing, up to his return to France in 1800. Writer, politician and the father of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand lived close to the heart of the France's travails in the nineteenth century and engaged with them passionately. His frankness, fluency and the tumultuous times in which he lived make his Memoirs one of the enduring monuments of the art of autobiography. - Summary by Nicole Lee