The novelist and essayist Michel Tournier has had a varied career as a producer and director for Radio Television Francaise, as a journalist, and as director of literary services for the French publishing firm Editions Plon. He was awarded the Grand Prix du Roman by the French Academy in 1967 for his first novel, Friday, a takeoff on Defoe's (see Vol. 1) Robinson Crusoe. Tournier's novels are highly complex, revealing a philosophical turn of mind through intricate sets of symbolic allusions. The French title of his second novel, Le Roi des Aulnes (1970), is from Goethe's poem on the Erl-King and has been translated into English as The Ogre. The book won Tournier international attention and… the Prix Goncourt.