Marxist historian of early modern France and Europe with wide-ranging interests in global history, political economy, the history of ideas and revolutionary struggles, Heller published ten books with a variety of prestigious university presses as well as with small and larger leftist imprints.

I became interested in literary relationships with communism and anti-fascism when I was an undergraduate student. I was curious about how modernist writing, often thought to have peaked by the mid-1920s, was transformed by the rise of fascism and the coming of the Second World War.