Baldick, Robert

Robert André Edouard Baldick, FRSL (9 November 1927 – April 24, 1972), was a British scholar of French literature, writer, translator and joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He wrote eight books, including biographies of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Frédérick Lemaître, and Henry Murger, and a history of the Siege of Paris. In addition, he edited and translated Pages from the Goncourt Journals and other classics of French literature, including Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, as well as works by Chateaubriand and Henri Barbusse and a number of novels by Georges Simenon. In The New Criterion, Eric Ormsby writes that Baldick's The Life of J.-K. Husymans is "able to hold its own with Painter's Proust or Ellman's Joyce". Baldick died unexpectedly of a cerebral tumor at age 44. His sons are Julian Baldick, an author specialising in Sufism, and the English academic Chris Baldick.