Pierre Drieu La Rochelle was one of the most original and influential writers of the French interwar generation. As novelist, poet, short-story writer, playwright, political essayist, and critic of literature and painting, Drieu participated in the principal historic and artistic upheavals of his time--World War I, surrealism, literary cubism, the political watershed of the thirties, World War II in occupied France--and was an early champion of Aragon, Malraux, Céline, Hemingway, Lawrence, Huxley, Picasso, and Matisse. His choice of a utopian "socialisme fasciste" in the mid 1930s and his editorship of the Nouvelle Revue Française for three years under the German occupation led, after his suicide in 1945, to the immediate decline of his literary reputation. However, the persistent fascination of Drieu's artistic vision, in particular of his ill-timed epic novel Gilles (1939), has spurred a gradual reappraisal of his work. Unfortunately this posthumous literary revival, often...