André Malraux

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-binding orator at anti-fascist rallies, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 he organized a volunteer bomber squadron for the hard-pressed Republicans, even though he had never piloted an airplane. Taken prisoner by the Germans in June 1940, he escaped to the French "free zone" and later teamed up with a British-trained SOE captain to form a brigade of resistance fighters, which he led all the way to Strasbourg in 1944. Impressed by his quick-witted intelligence and erudition, General de Gaulle made him Minister of Information in 1945 and later, in 1959, France's first Minister of Culture: two appointments which caused him later to be vilified by leftists as a "traitor" to his revolutionary past.