Lucien Goldmann was one of the most important independent Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe during the past two decades. His interests and works—in philosophy, sociology, history, and aesthetics—were classically broad, insisting as he did on the indivisibility of social experience. He was probably the most prominent of the pupils of Georg Lukács and in turn helped form a whole generation of French and German humanist Marxists. The course he taught at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes was a mecca for European and Third World students. His major work The Hidden God, on Pascal and Racine, remains a classic in the sociology and epistemology of literature; The Theory of the Novel is currently being translated by Random House. The study below continues the socio/structural line of inquiry followed in his work on Genet (T38) and Gombrowicz (T47).