San Antonio College Library

This important new translation brings the diary of Jean Cocteau to America for the first time. Diary of an Unknown was started in 1951, at about the time Cocteau begin his famous journals. This more personal document is at once intensely intimate and deeply philosophical. In these essays - which often recall the essays of Montaigne with their strictness of form, theme, and syntax - Cocteau reveals himself as never before. Like the Surrealists, Cocteau...

"Tell Jean Cocteau that I adore him, the only person for whom Myth opens its gates, and from which he returns bronzed as from the seaside," wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Cocteau's work has inspired this same degree of admiration in many people, but until now the "mystery" he insists upon has defied critics of his novels, plays and poems. In this first book-length analysis in English of one of the most fascinating literary figures of our time,...

Brown's biography is the fullest, the most ambitious close-up of Le Petit Cocteau's seven decades to appear in English. Brown evidently scoured all libraries, periods, and sources (including Cocteau's correspondence and the various memoirs of his friends), giving the reader the incidents, events, and revelations of one of the foremost creative minds of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early...

When Oedipus met the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, he did more than answer a riddle - he spawned a myth that, told and retold, would become one of Western culture's central narratives about self-understanding. Identifying the story as a threshold myth - in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and dangerous realm where rules and limits are not known - Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a fresh account of this mythic encounter and how it deals with...

Jean Cocteau was a very versatile 20th century artist. Author of "Les Enfants Terribles," and "la Belle et la Bête," he was one of the most influential French writers of the 1920s and the 1930s. His large body of work includes poetry, novels, works for theater and films, paintings, opera and dance, and journalistic criticism. He was criticized by the surrealists to whom he was compared. He struggled with religion, opium addiction and was openly...

Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau's "fragile genius--a combination almost unlivable in art" but in his case so fertile. Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director,...