Machiavelli in Hell

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

In this intellectual biography Sebastian de Grazia presents a new vision of Machiavelli that evokes, with uncanny precision, the great Florentine thinker’s presence. After providing an engrossing account of Machiavelli's childhood and the period following his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to an examination of The Prince. The details of Machiavelli’s life never cease to weave in and out of the narrative, as we read how his ideas gather power and coalesce into a unified vision of humankind and the world.

“De Grazia’s achievement is to present a totally comprehensive view of Machiavelli mediated entirely through Machiavelli's own language.” —Journal of Modern History

“Engrossing, stimulating and a marvel. . . . I have rarely read a work of scholarship so elegrantly done.” —A. Bartlett Giamatti

“A model of how intellectual biography should be done.” —Joseph Frank

“Both monumental and intimate, provocative and winning . . . [de Grazia]’s Machiavelli is complex, brilliant, attractive [and] profound.” —Christian Science Monitor