Born in Iași into a family that was related to the metropolitan bishop Veniamin Costache [ro], he studied law at the University of Bucharest (degree in 1928), philosophy and philology (degree in 1929) before going in 1931 on a two-year[1] scholarship to the United States of America, where he received a PhD in aesthetics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, with a thesis entitled The Nature of Beauty and Its Relation to Goodness (published later in Romanian in 1946 as Kalokagathon[2]).
[3] Before the Second World War, he published in several Romanian newspapers, for example Adevărul, Adevărul literar și artistic, Azi, Stânga, Arta, Excelsior, Da și nu, Ulisse and was an editor at Vremea (1931–1936), Rampa (1933–1934), Revista Fundațiilor Regale (from its foundation to 1943).
[4] Alone or in cooperation with others, he translated from English or Russian works of D. H. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Eugene O’Neill, J.
He was critically acclaimed by his contemporaries, Camil Petrescu calling him "the leader" of their generation, Barbu Brezianu its "herald", Mircea Eliade its "magus".
[5] Comarnescu was married to Gina Manolescu-Strunga, the daughter of a liberal politician, but she had been in love with N. D. Cocea, a well-known writer and journalist, from the age of 17 (and by whom she would become pregnant after her marriage).