The 120 Days of Sodom

In 1785, the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille. In thirty-seven days of feverish writing, on a roll of paper twelve metres long, he produced the most extreme work of literary transgression in Western history. When the Bastille fell four years later, the manuscript was lost — and de Sade mourned it for the rest of his life as the best thing he ever wrote.

The 120 Days of Sodom is not a work for the casual reader. It is a systematic, escalating, philosophically rigorous exploration of transgression — a catalogue that pushes human experience to its absolute outermost limits, and then further. De Sade’s intention was not mere provocation: it was to construct a philosophical argument about the nature beneath the surface of civilised life, and to pursue that argument without flinching from its conclusions.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn with full scholarly apparatus, makes the text available in the most authoritative English version yet produced — for serious students of literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.