[1] In 1918, he transferred to the lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where he studied under the philosopher Alain, to prepare for his entry to the École normale supérieure, in 1919.
In June 1925, Adrienne Monnier launched a French language review, Le Navire d'Argent,[2] and invited Prévost to be its literary editor.
He joined the underground National Committee of Writers, created by Louis Aragon and his wife, and took part in the creation of the clandestine newspaper Les Étoiles at the end of 1942.
He wrote a doctoral thesis: La création chez Stendhal, essai sur le métier d'écrire et la psychologie de l'écrivain (Creativity in Stendhal, essay on the craft of writing and the psychology of the writer), which won the grand prize for literature of the Académie française in 1943.
[1] Biographer Jérôme Garcin writes that Prévost fought with "a gun in his hand and a knife in his pocket and, in his backpack, the unfinished manuscript of his Baudelaire together with a portable typewriter".