In his autobiography
Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), Whittaker Chambers raved about Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables (Paris: Hetzel, 1862), which he read over and over when he was young. Although the book, in his view, is flawed and falls short of being a literary classic, nonetheless, in its pages are found "the play of forces that carried me into the Communist Party and out of the Communist Party." Chambers said that the book taught him that Christianity and revolution are irreconcilable and that ambition, arrogance, pride and power cannot overcome an authentic and persistent humility, which is the basic virtue of life.
Les Misérables, said Chambers, taught him Christianity, although he "scarcely knew it," and gave him his "first full-length picture of the modern world--a vast, complex, scarcely human structure, built over a social abyss of which the sewers of Paris was the symbol, and resting with crushing weight upon the wretched of the earth."
Loved that book. Should be required reading for all Americans.