Maurice Nadeau

Orphaned during the First World War, Nadeau attended the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where he discovered politics.

He then read Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which inspired him to join the Ligue Communiste, a Trotskyist party created by Pierre Naville.

The book was the major reference work on surrealism for long despite the fact that André Breton disliked it.

At the Liberation, Nadeau became a critic for the resistance newspaper Combat, edited by Albert Camus, with the help of its editor-in-chief Pascal Pia.

In 1982, he wrote a fine introduction (replacing that of John Fowles) to the French edition of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, published by Maurice Nadeau/Papyrus under the title Sarnia, the Latin name for Guernsey, the setting of the novel.