[6] Cravan was born and educated in Lausanne, Switzerland, then at an English military academy; he was expelled under mysterious circumstances, but some sources suggest that it was for spanking a teacher.

[9] The magazine was designed to cause sensation; in a piece about the 1914 arts salon, Cravan viciously criticised a self-portrait by Marie Laurencin, stating that it looked like she "needed a good shag".

[10] His remarks drove Laurencin's lover and influential modernist critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire into a fury that resulted in a bid for a duel.

[citation needed] Cravan's rough vibrant poetry and provocative, anarchistic lectures and public appearances (often degenerating into drunken brawls) earned him the admiration of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton, and other young artists and intellectuals.

Carolyn Burke notes that Amelia von Ende, writing in The Dial in 1914, argued that Cravan "had not only put the idea of pluralisme into poetic form but also invented the term 'machinisme', which very appropriately characterises the mechanical and industrial side of our life.

On 13 January 1916 Cravan arrived in New York on the same ship as Leon Trotsky, Carolyn Burke notes, "just a few weeks before the Kaiser announced the resumption of attacks on steamships".

[6] While Cravan's practices may have aligned with certain anarchist and socialist principles, he was staunchly unaffiliated, mocked all notions of progress and subscribed to no single ideology or movement.

In 1917, Cravan met the poet Mina Loy at a war benefit ball where the dress code was modern art movements.

That night Cravan had to deliver an address on "The Independent Artists of France and America" but he was pranked by Picabia and Duchamp who got him so drunk that he ended up swaying and slurring his speech on the platform, shouting obscenities and removing his coat, vest, collar and suspenders.

[6] This led to his arrest by four private detectives at the event but, after being taken to the local police station, Cravan was soon bailed out by friend Walter Conrad Arensberg who took him back to his home at West Sixty-Seventh Street.

After many failed attempts to sail from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland due to the Canadian authorities refusing their lack of papers, Frost became ill and Cravan boarded a schooner bound for Mexico alone.

It never made any difference what we were doing – making love or respectfully eyeing canned foods in groceries, eating our tamales at street corners or walking among weeds.

[6] During this time there was increasing pressure for the couple to leave Mexico City as Cravan, being a draft-dodger, was being pursued by American law enforcement.

Shadow-Box (1999), a novel by Irish author Antonia Logue, is a fictional version of the interweaving of the lives of Cravan, Mina Loy and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world.