Denis Diderot

Diderot studied philosophy with the Jesuits, flirted with the clergy, then told his father in 1734 he'd be a writer instead - and was promptly disowned. He spent the next decade scraping by, producing fiction and essays in the 1740s, including the novel Les Bijoux indiscrets. In 1751 he and Jean le Rond d'Alembert launched the Encyclopédie, the first encyclopedia to credit contributors by name and chronicle the mechanical arts; its secular skepticism about Biblical miracles enraged the Church, which banned it in 1758, then the French crown a year later. Contributors scattered, some jailed. D'Alembert quit in 1759; Diderot soldiered on alone until 1765, writing around 7,000 entries, increasingly despondent, sure the whole thing was for nothing. He stayed poor and unrecognized - denied a seat in the Académie Française - until 1766, when Catherine the Great of Russia bought his 3,000-volume library for 15,000 livres, paid him 50 years of custodian salary up front, and later hosted him at her court in Saint Petersburg for five months of weekly essays and conversation. His plays and encyclopedia work made him known in life; his best writing - Jacques the Fatalist, Ra