Cocteau, Jean (Vol. 1) - Cocteau, Jean 1889–1963
Cocteau, Jean 1889–1963
French poet, playwright, and film writer and director, Cocteau was associated with many avant garde movements, especially surrealism and cubism. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 25-28.)
Jean Cocteau is a figure whose real stature and specific value seem to have escaped his contemporaries. Not that they were not fascinated by his quicksilver brilliancy, but it was rather in the way that certain extravagant "sacred monsters" of screen and stage fascinate the imagination. He was a Parisian rather than a literary figure and never kept in step with the rather solemn literary establishment in France. From the beginning of his career his style of life, his way of being was the antithesis of bourgeois. He was the friend of all the mavericks—Colette, Apollinaire, and Max Jacob; Satie, Picasso, and Diaghilev, to mention only a few. If we see at the center of French literary life in his time the eminently solid phalanx of...
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