(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is "Les Miserables "(1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. "Les Miserables "is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama--highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications--of the redemption of one human being.

維剋多·雨果（Victor Hugo，1802-1885），19世紀法國浪漫主義文學的代錶人物。貫穿他一生活動和創作的主導思想是人道主義、反對暴力、以愛製“惡”。其文學創作有詩歌、小說、戲劇、政論、散文隨筆以及文學評論，捲帙浩繁。代錶作有長篇小說《巴黎聖母院》、《海上勞工》、《悲 慘世界》及《九三年》等。