A graduate of Yale, he gained his Masters degree in playwriting from New York University and has gone on to write plays that have been performed across Manhattan and the country. He has been published three times in The Best Short Plays series and his work has appeared in Conjunctions and The Paris Review. No such luck. For almost two centuries, scholars, critics and fellow artists have been rooting about in Sade's grave, in an effort to form a conclusive portrait of the man.
Opinions are wildly divergent.
A few even praise Justine as a work to rival the satire of Jonathan Swift. His writing is attacked as monotonous, his philosophy sophomoric, and his impact on the world of letters merely toxic. Sade's fiction is more extreme than anything we might find in contemporary culture. In Sade's 1795 novel Philosophy of the Boudoir, an elderly dowager is forcibly infected with syphilis. Coprophilia, mutilation, necrophilia and pederasty are staples of Sade's oeuvre.