Few men have lived the twentieth century as André Malraux. From Angkor Wat to China in the 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to the French Resistance against the Germans, from being an intellectual viewing the world from the outside to being the cabinet minister -- working for de Gaulle and others to rule it -- such is Malraux's life as it has been known to the world. But is this really Malraux's life? What is appearance and what reality? Jean Lacouture turns now to trace the life of this most ambiguous and complex person. Based on vast research and a great many interviews, some with Malraux himself, Lacouture has written a biography that is both a marvel of scholarly investigation and an exceptionally subtle description of those shadow areas that exist between a man's life and his work, his memory and his imagination. -- From publisher's description.