num_pages: 583
description: Jean Cocteau, a major French 20th-century artist, was a deliberate scandal. The astonishing variety of his work as poet, novelist, playwright, and film-maker (The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus); and the contradictions and paradoxes of his private life, the charm and the nastiness, the generosity, and the egomania, the poise and the anguish of an opium-addicted homosexual, a man who knew everyone who mattered in the arts, and who capped an avant-garde life by entering, without seeming contradiction, the formidable conservative precincts of the Académie Francaise-all this is elegantly woven by Mr Steegmuller into the gorgeous tapestry of this award-winning and riveting biography.
language: English
title: Cocteau, a Biography.
titlecomplete: Cocteau, a Biography.
genres: France, Biography, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 44
awards: awardedAt: 31564800000
name: National Book Award
category: Arts and Letters
publisher: Little Brown & Company