André Malraux

by Curtis Cate

Often hailed as a "Renaissance man" for the astounding diversity of his activities, Andre Malraux was a living legend long before his death in 1976. Few French writers of this century have aroused such heated controversy and none, during a stormy lifetime, ever achieved greater international renown as a "hero" in deed as well as word. At the age of seventeen he shocked his parents by abandoning his high-school studies, going on in just three years to become a prosperous rare-book publisher, a keen literary critic, and an author of fantastic fiction. He then turned himself into a self-taught archaeologist and staged a bold statue-lifting raid on an abandoned Cambodian temple - an exploit which catapulted him to notoriety when he was only twenty-three. Four years later he dumbfounded the skeptics with a remarkable first novel (The Conquerors), later winning the coveted Goncourt Prize with La Condition humaine (Man's Fate). After Hitler's rise to power, he transformed himself into a spell