Poet, actor, playwright, surrealist, drug addict, asylum inmate Antonin Artaud (1896 1949) is one of the twentieth century s most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers. In this biography, David A. Shafer takes readers on a voyage through Artaud s life, which he spent amid the company of France s most influential cultural figures, even as he stood apart from them.
Shafer casts Artaud as a person with tenacious values. Even though Artaud was born in the material comfort of a bourgeois family from Marseille, he uncompromisingly rejected bourgeois values and norms. Becoming...