Raymond Radiguet's tale of first love was one of the most startling literary debuts of all time. Published to the accompaniment of unprecedented publicity in 1923, it continues to command both popular admiration and critical esteem.

The narrator, clever, sophisticated schoolboy of sixteen, enters into an affair with nineteen-year old Marthe who has only just married Jacques, a soldier at the front. Their liason soon becomes a scandal: horrified and incredulous, their families refuse to accept what is happening even when the novel reaches its tragic climax.

A small masterpiece, Le Diable au Corps, expresses all the anguish, joy and misery of adolescence, observed with a cruel unsentimental eye and recorded in a style of classic simplicity. Richard Girffiths presents the book as a model of modern narrative technique. His concentration on its qualities as a novel provides an illuminating contrast to the biographical approach of earlier editors.

The author of only two novels, Radiguet died a few months after Le Diable au Corps appeared, at the age of twenty.