The Red and the Black : An Ambitious Young Man Claws His Way Out of Poverty Into French High Society. Nothing About How He Does It Is Admirable.

Julien Sorel is a carpenter's son with a brilliant memory, a burning ambition, and no intention of staying poor — so he uses whatever's in reach, a tutoring position, a seduction, a seminary education he doesn't believe in, to claw his way into a class that would otherwise never let him in. Stendhal tracks every calculation and every moment of genuine feeling Julien can't quite suppress, in a novel that reads Restoration-era France with the same cold precision Julien uses to read the people around him.Widely considered one of the first true psychological novels and a foundational text of literary realism — still assigned as the sharpest portrait ever written of ambition eating a person from the inside.