120 Days of Sodom

120 Days of Sodom, a sexually explicit account of several months of debauchery, written in 1785 in French as Cent vingt journées de Sodome, ou l’école du libertinage by the Marquis de Sade while he was imprisoned in the Bastille. It was not published until 1904.

The book tells the infamous tale of four libertines who kidnap selected victims for a nonstop orgy and subject them to rape, torture, and various mutilations. It was responsible for introducing the term sadism into Western culture and became an underground classic in the 19th century before it was granted legitimacy as a work of literature in the 20th. Many readers have interpreted the work as surreal and not meant to be taken literally. André Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire were both instrumental in salvaging Sade’s reputation, introducing him as a man of ideas rather than as a mere pornographer. In the 20th century, with the advent of Freudian psychiatry, Sade’s book was read as a study of human sexuality. The book was reissued in three volumes in 1931–35 by the Société du Roman Philosophique (“Society for the Philosophical Novel”), a group formed solely to edit and publish Sade’s works, and it continued to be examined and published in new editions into the 21st century.