SOURCE: "Anarchism, Action, and Malraux," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall, 1978, pp. 272-89.

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.

In the autumn of 1920, after a long and shattering conflict, French literati were groping in many directions seeking to reformulate an aesthetic for the new, postwar world. It was at that time that the 18-year-old André Malraux published his second literary effort—a prose-poem entitled "Prologue"—together with a negative review of the new André Breton-Philippe Soupault work, Les Champs magnétiques. Both items appeared in the October issue of Florent Fels' little avant-garde magazine, Action.¹ The text of the review is particularly noteworthy. Although Malraux agreed that Breton's book was "plus susceptible d'être imité que les poèmes de M. Tzara, par exemple, si caracteris...