Following the recent publication of Roland Barthes's Complete Works in French, this book explores the development of ideas across his career. Aware of the pitfalls of a biographical approach to the 'Death of the Author' theorist, Andy Stafford attempts to find Barthes somewhere between the writer as both product and producer of his time, by looking at influences on, and the reception of, his work. Barthes's life is divided into three distinct phases: the polemical journalist prior to 1960; the academic theorist in the 60s; and the celebrated intellectual of the 1970s.