This book offers a tested method for teaching yourself to become proficient in reading French, quickly building your vocabulary, and enabling you to extract meaning without word-for-word translation. If you have had two years of high school or one year of college French, it will enable you to read with ease and enjoyment French periodicals and newspapers, or works in your special field of interest.

Designed for auxiliary use outside the classroom, the book offers systematic training in those special skills and techniques which promote efficient reading. It can be used independently by the student who has acquired a modest vocabulary, and a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and sentence structure.

"This book is not another reader, but rather a reading manual, new in its approach, tested and tried in the classroom. It aims to give systematic training in the skills and techniques necessary for reading French—skills that are not taught by any of the usual readers."—from the Foreword

Lester G. Crocker (1912-2002) was a noted scholar of eighteenth-century French literature and Enlightenment philosophy. In the 1950s he was a professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. He is also the author of An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment, Rousseau's Social Contract: An Interpretive Essay, and Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach and Synthesis.