Really loved this book! His chapter on Wall Street had me laughing all night. He closed the book with describing how he nearly burned to death in a housefire. Riveting. I then ordered his book covering the 1930s, Infidel in the Temple. If it is as good as Life Among the Surrealists, then I will probably read at least one of his biographies of Zola, Rousseau, Hugo, Stendahl, or Edison. Maybe The Robber Barons, The Politicos, or Portrait of the Artist as An American. ( )

Non Fiction, Memoir, Paris during the 1920s, the French dadaists, the surrealist group, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Malcolm Cowley, Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane "'Those who survived the war were abandoned when peace arrived, and were left not only with the feeling that they were 'lost', but with full knowledge that they had to set off a powerful opposition to civilisation, which had caused the lengthy destruction orgy in the first place". First published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, January 1962, Hardcover, 403 pp.; First Italian edition, Milano, 1965, Il Saggiatore, 447 pp., 16mo, translated by Matilde Boffito Serra ( )