Aragon became well known in the 1920s as a poet and cofounder with André Breton of the surrealist movement. Following his political conversion in the early 1930s, for some thirty-five years Aragon the Communist writer dominated leftist literature in France. In this most longlasting of his incarnations he was guided by his muse Elsa Triolet, the Russian-born writer he met in 1928. In his last fifteen years Aragon haunted the French artistic scene as a literary elder statesman, publishing puzzling experimental novels, overseeing new comprehensive editions of his and Elsa Triolet's works, and reshaping his literary past in a series of still unevaluated autobiographical and critical texts. As the living man--attractive, flamboyant, irritating, sentimental, pedantic, self-indulgent, intoxicated with words--recedes from center stage, a more complex figure begins to emerge: the self-created, acutely deliberate professional man of letters--in the twentieth-century active style. Aragon's mode of life and work, while the opposite of Joyce's or Flaubert's, is no less typical of the modernist adventure.
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