The Prince has outraged readers for centuries. As T. S. Eliot wrote, "Machiavelli has been the torment of Jesuits and Calvinists, the idol of Napoleons and Nietzsches, a stock figure for Elizabethan drama, and the exemplar of a Mussolini or a Lenin." This special edition also includes Machiavelli's "Letter to Francesco Vettori, "The Life of Castruccio, and selections from the" Discourses on Livy.

Wayne A. Rebhorn is the Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, he has written extensively on Renaissance literature in English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Latin.