Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the French philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. This volume contains the first English translations of his plays, The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family. These complex and very entertaining plays delve into the attitudes of the middle-class, bourgeois society and reveal an eighteenth-century "suburbia" that populates dramatic and suspenseful situations and settings. The translations are vivid and contemporary and bring the plays alive to early twenty-first-century stage and culture.