The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres, is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay, and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number of new and difficult words ... into the French language".
Title-page of a c. 1532 edition of Pantagruel
Illustration by Gustave Doré, Chapter XXXVIII
Illustration by Gustave Doré, Chapter XXV
Illustration by Gustave Doré, Chapter XLI
François Rabelais was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author. A humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholar, he attracted opposition from both John Calvin and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Though in his day he was best known as a physician, scholar, diplomat, and Catholic priest, later he became better known as a satirist, for his depictions of the grotesque, and for his larger-than-life characters.
François Rabelais
Rabelais worked at the hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon from 1532 to 1535.
Rabelais' three trips to Rome were under the protection of Jean du Bellay.
The house of François Rabelais in Metz