Numbering more than four hundred in all, including the beloved Inspector Maigret stories, Georges Simenon's novels have been translated into some fifty languages, with sales exceeding 500 million copies worldwide. Now, drawing on unprecedented access to Simenon's papers, family, and friends, Pierre Assouline gives us the utterly absorbing story of this tormented and egomaniacal genius of literary mass production.

The narrative begins with a troubled youth in France during the 1920s: Simenon's early involvement with crime and prostitutes inspired the guilt that would haunt his adulthood and the subjects he would obsessively probe in his fiction. Assouline vividly re-creates Simenon's complex and painful family relationships, as well as his controversial political activities, occasionally as a partisan of the extreme Right.

As we witness Simenon's evolution into a self-fashioned literary prodigy (at the height of powers he could produce eighty pages a day), we also watch the growth - and satisfaction - of his notoriously outsize appetites for fame, wealth, and women. And we see him in the company of some of the great cultural icons of his time, including his lover Josephine Baker as well as Henry Miller, Colette, Jean Renoir, and Andre Gide, who called Simenon the greatest novelist of the century.