How did Roland Barthes -- who was from a provincial background and only began publishing at the age of 38 -- become a touchstone of late, 20th-century literary and cultural theory? How could a writer who never won a literary prize become the prime theorist and practitioner of écriture? Is it possible to write about the intellectual life of a thinker whose major concern, at the end of his career, was to undermine and refute any attempt to fix his image or ideas?

Following the recent publication of Roland Barthes's Complete Works, this book explores Barthes's unorthodox rise to intellectual stardom and the development of his ideas and writing practices throughout his career. Aware of the pitfalls in adopting a biographical approach to the arch critic of bourgeois myth and the theorist who famously proclaimed the "Death of the Author," Andy Stafford attempts to locate Barthes somewhere in the dialogue between the writer and his time, the man and his work, the author and his subject.

Dividing Barthes's life into three distinct phases -- the polemical journalist of post-war France, the academic theorist in the 60s, and the celebrated intellectual of the 1970s -- this unique intellectual biography establishes the conditions in which it was possible for a academic outsider to become, in a little over a decade, one of France's most celebrated intellectuals, revealing the uneasy relationship between academia and artistic creativity.