Max Jacob - A Life In Art And Letters

Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early-twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso's initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire's guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau's loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die later that year.

In Max Jacob, the poet's complex relationships with art, faith, and sexuality play out against the lively backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. A nuanced, deeply researched biography more than thirty years in the making, Max Jacob offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry, making for a brilliant contribution to modernist scholarship.