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None of these books would lead one to believe that the writer could produce a stunner like The Charioteer. The story begins as 5-year-old Laurie, unable to sleep, wanders through the house to find his father packing to leave for good. It ends as an adult Laurie, having experienced the ravages of war and the complications of exploring his forbidden emotional and sexual geography, makes a choice that will shape the rest of his life.

Laurie's final choice is both the right one and the wrong one, the higher road and the lower. He's known love of the purest sort and the lustiest sort, and the choice he makes may not be the best, but it is the most human and humane he can think of.

But it was The Last of the Wine, first published half a century ago, that made Renault, at 51, an international literary figure. It's the story of Alexias, a young Greek man, and Lysis, his lover, as they go to war for the democracy that their home city of Athens invented, lost and regained at great cost. It's the Greece of Athens and Sparta, of Socrates and Plato — the cradle of the Greco-Roman society that created the best of what our democracy is all about.

The powerful love between these two men, never easy in any sense, is the glue that holds together a strange combination of history lesson and adventure story, philosophy discussion and romantic saga. It is also about as discreet in its depiction of sex as one can get outside of a Mother Goose nursery rhyme, which makes it ironic that while Wine was immediately hailed and widely accepted in Britain and Europe, it took another six years for U.S. publishers to feel safe releasing it here. Once published, it was accepted as a superb work of historical fiction.

Renault's next two books, The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull From the Sea (1962) are excellent, exciting and interesting interpretations of the Theseus legends of prehistoric Greece. The first details the ascendancy of the male deity over the female, the mortal male over the female. The second recounts the first great tragic triangle of father, stepmother and son.

Celebrating its 40th birthday this year, Renault's The Mask of Apollo returns to the history lesson format of Wine as she uses a traveling actor to describe the efforts of Plato to bring a young dictator to philosophical enlightenment. It's also a journey of evolution as Nikeratos, the actor, who is clearly gay, rises to his own ethical best as he carries around a golden mask of the god for his performances. It's a good book, but frankly the actor can get on one's nerves.

In 1970 the first installment of Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy, Fire From Heaven, was published. It combines many of the best elements of Wine, King and Bull: accurate history, rich personalities and a whip-along story line. It is a bit sympathetic to Alexander (Renault obviously adores him), but the representation of the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion is, in this book and the next two, complicated, subtle and utterly believable. Fire From Heaven, an excellent book that is nonetheless the weakest of the Alexander trilogy, takes its hero from childhood through his 18th year, by which time he had been regent of his country and commander of its cavalry.

If Wine made Renault an international literary figure, The Persian Boy (1972), the second Alexander installment, made her a popular icon. It is written from the point of view of a young man who, because his family loses in a civil conflict, is sold into slavery, castrated and turned into a sex slave. Through circumstance and skills of several sorts, Bagoas rises to become Alexander's courtesan. He is not the narrator one might expect in a New York Times bestseller. But Renault writes of the slave's trials and his adoration for his lover and master with such sensitivity and skill that it reaches even those who might not normally accept such a tale.

After Boy, Renault took three years to write and publish her only major nonfiction work, The Nature of Alexander (1975). The Praise Singer (1979) represents another interruption in the completion of the Alexander trilogy. This book steps well outside Renault's customary style with what many reviewers and readers describe as a “cool” or “distant” tone. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, described it this way: “A song of praise, a work of love, a serene, deliberate book, full of wisdom, rich in character, incident, and description.” The poet narrator, Simonides of Keos, is also straight.

The Funeral Games is the last of the Alexander trilogy and the last of her books. The New York Times called it “Renault's best historical novel yet,” with an emphasis on factual accuracy and the relatively low level of poetic speculation.

Mary Challans, aka Mary Renault, was a remarkable and complex woman. She loved and lived with the same woman for 50 years, yet refused to identify herself as a lesbian. She wrote pioneering, sympathetic books about gay men, yet objected to the gay liberation movement. Fifty years after the first publication of The Last of the Wine, it is appropriate that we pay homage to what she accomplished and try to understand who she was. Think of it as a makeup assignment that is actually entertaining.

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