For the first time, the three-part autobiography of one of modern Egypt's greatest writers and thinkers is available in a single paperback volume. The first part, 'An Egyptian Childhood' (1929), is full of the sounds and smells of rural Egypt. It tells of the author's childhood and early education in a small village in Upper Egypt, as he learns not only to come to terms with this blindness but to excel in spite of it and win a place at the prestigious Azhar University in Cairo.

The second part, 'The Stream of Days: A Student at the Azhar (1929), is an enthralling picture of student life in Egypt in the early 1900's, and the record of the growth of an unusually gifted personality.

More than forty years later, Hussein published 'A Passage to France' (1973), carrying the story on to his final attainment of a doctorate at the Sorbonne, a saga of preseverance in the face of daunting odds.

Taha Hussein (1889 - 1973), blind from early childhood, rose from humble beginnings to pursue a distinguished career in Egyptian public life (he was at one time Minister of Education). But he was most influential through his voluminous, varied, and controversial writings. He was unofficially known as the 'Dean of Arabic Letters,' and the distinguished Egyptian critic Louis Awad described his as 'the greatest single intellectual and cultural influence on the literature of his period.'