A novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist of the generation that came on the literary scene after World War I, Camil Petrescu was an avant-gardist whose influence on Romanian fiction has been exceptional. He was an extraordinarily sensitive intellectual and aesthete whose writings dizzy the reader with continually expanding implications and suggestions.

Although his works abound in confessional narratives, Petrescu was reluctant to reveal information about his childhood and adolescence. He was born on 9 April 1894 in Bucharest; his father was a twenty-eight-year-old post-office clerk from Braila. Little is known of his mother, Ana Keller Petrescu, other than that she was in her early twenties at the time of Petrescu's birth and was already a widow. About three days after her son's birth Ana Petrescu departed for the provinces, where she had left an older son; he died within two weeks after her arrival. She never returned to Bucharest, and...