Still revered today for his off-kilter prose poems, Max Jacob (1876-1944) was also known in the Paris of his own era for his gift of friendship, inspiring and supporting Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Jean Cocteau. Reintroducing the modernist prophet of Montmartre, Rosanna Warren probes the poet's charms and his contradictions: a Jewish homosexual, Jacob converted to Catholicism after seeing a vision of Christ in 1915, yet later fell victim to the Gestapo.

"[This biography] painstakingly reconstructs the scene of an entire generation of artists and writers through Jacob's eyes…. Warren wears many hats—translator, critic, chronicler—to resuscitate a richly contradictory figure."—NYTBR