French writer and politician André Malraux (1901-1976) was generally regarded as one of the most distinguished novelists of the 20th century. Malraux holds the distinction of having been France's first minister of culture, serving from 1959-69....

André Malraux is one of the most misunderstood French writers of the twentieth century, both in his native land and in much of the English-speaking world. Despite numerous publications devoted to him, he remains, somewhat paradoxically, an...

Domnica Radulescu. Peter Lang, New York. $20. 0-8204-2296-7. 'The desire to be king is foolish', said Malraux, 'but everyone must seek a kingdom'. It was his belief in France which gave focus to the hitherto vague ideals which had sustained the young Malraux....

Many discriminating non-French critics and some French connoisseurs of literature had realized by 1976, when Malraux died, that he was essentially phony. He had pretended to the French people that he had been a people's commissar in the Chinese revolution and that he had...

In the following essay, Langlois discusses the publication of the post-World War I French avant-garde magazine Action and its influence on the political writings of André Malraux.

Behind the many masks of eroticism and heroism—whether he seems momentarily to express Communist or Gaullist ideology, whether he chooses the novel or the essay as his means of expression—Malraux (perhaps like most great writers) has reiterated only one point under the most diverse forms: the absolute impossibility for any individual to communicate with any other, even with those who belong to the same group…. The book in which this message, the inexorability of human solitude, appears ...

André Malraux wrote about men and places. The men were larger than life and the places distant. Women scarcely figured in his books, and when they did they functioned as backdrops which reflected and glorified their men…. [For] Malraux, the novelist and the man, political controversies have always provided the pretext to confront larger, more metaphysical problems. The French title for Man's Fate is La Condition humaine, and this phrase, gleaned from Pascal, bespeaks a concern with broa...