• About this Book
• About the Author
• Read an Excerpt

Written by Olivier Todd

• Format: Hardcover, 560 pages
• Publisher: Knopf
• On Sale: February 22, 2005
• Price: $35.00
• ISBN: 978-0-375-40702-4 (0-375-40702-2)

about this book

Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, André Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd—author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus—gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject’s previously little-known mythomania.

We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man’s Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux’s lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings.

With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux’s genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.


“It's a beguiling cultural juxtaposition: a biography of France's most celebrated modern action hero of freedom and democracy appearing just when France most reviles America's new policy of aggressively pushing such values around the world . . . Malraux shows us the inner American in every French intellectual.” —Carlin Romano, The Chronicle of Higher Education

“Indispensable to anyone who wishes not only to understand so complex, perverse and brilliant a man as Malraux but also the mark he made on the political and literary imagination of his time, and indeed of our own.” —William Pfaff, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Lively . . . Malraux provides a clue to understanding what outsiders often find so baffling about the behavior of the French state.” —Stefan Collini, The Nation

“Astute . . . Todd presents a true picture of Malraux, balancing his achievements with his blemishes. Very good reading for those interested in French politics.” —Bob Ivey, Library Journal

“To read Olivier Todd’s Malraux is to marvel at a culture where politicians, businessmen, and socialites defer to the traditional authority of the man of letters. . . . As Mr. Todd shows, for the first time in such great and irrefutable detail, myth is exactly what most of Malraux’s exploits were. Few biographers are so completely, eagerly, and at times vindictively devoted to debunking their subject. When one considers the scale and success of Malraux’s deceptions, it is easy to understand why. . . . Today, when the liberal order is again threatened by such ‘savage certainties,’ Malraux’s mystifications seem more relevant, and more worthy of challenge, than ever.” —Adam Kirsch, New York Sun

“Dashingly brilliant . . . Marvelously enjoyable . . . Todd, by turns elegant, sarcastic, disdainfully well read, pounces and plays with his hide-and-seek subject, writing in the present tense. The result is delightful reading.” —Kirkus

“Wittily bracing . . . [Todd’s] use of the present tense throughout gives the narrative a lively tone, immersing the reader in Malraux’s frantic existence. Todd indelibly captures the writer’s enormous charisma.” —Publishers Weekly