The Last of the Just is a post-war novel by André Schwarz-Bart originally published in French (as Le Dernier des justes) in 1959. It was published in an English translation by Stephen Becker in 1960. It was Schwarz-Bart's first book and won the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary prize.^[1] The author was the son of a Polish Jewish family murdered by the Nazis and he based the story on the massacre in York.^[2]

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The story follows the "Just Men" of the Levy family over eight centuries. Each Just Man is a Lamed Vav, one of the thirty-six righteous souls whose existence justifies the purpose of humankind to God.^[3] Each "bear the world's pains... beginning with the execution of an ancestor in 12th-century York, England... culminat[ing] in the story of a schoolboy, Ernie, the last... executed at Auschwitz."^[4] It has been described as an enduring classic that reminds "how easily torn is the precious fabric of civilization, and how destructive are the consequences of dumb hatred-whether a society's henchmen are permitted to beat an Ernie Levy because he's Jewish, or because he's black or gay or Hispanic or homeless."^[5]

Gilbert Highet, a Book-of-the-Month Club judge called it, "the saddest novel I have ever read, almost as sad as history."^[6]