The radio, however, found a friend in Andre
Maurois, who recognized his own debt to the medium and felt that society had perhaps not yet adjusted to it.
(13)
Maurois is usually omitted from specialist bibliographies.
"The first choice,"
Maurois asserts, the biographer "must make is that of a subject." (14) As I noted above, my journey to LaBrant was impacted by constraints related to writing educational biography as a doctoral dissertation: choosing an educator of some significance to the field, finding a subject with enough artifacts of her/his life to make the project achievable, matching my scholarly goals with an appropriate subject.
When I read the life of Disraeli by Andre
Maurois (a present for my thirteenth birthday), I again wondered about the origins of social elites.
Maurois' biography was translated on publication before the war.
The angel they seek can be found in the golden reminiscences of Trelawny, or the charming romance by Andre
Maurois." The Shelley who emerges from his study bears less resemblance to Ariel, as
Maurois styled him, than to Charles Manson--a vain, shrill, mutinous, often hysterical aspiring guru who drifted around Europe with his flock of young women, leaving a trail of dead babies (and a drowned ex-wife) behind him.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir bestrode the awed world like Wagnerian giants, and when they arrived in Tokyo, to be guided around the country by Asabuki Tomiko, celebrated in her own country as the funnel through which contemporary French literature had entered Japan (
Maurois, Sagan, Cocteau, Beauvoir herself), sixty reporters and photographers and thousands of students awaited them at Haneda Airport.
America as seen by Therese Bentzon, Jules Huret and Andre
Maurois. University of Georgia M.A.
Andre
Maurois, the biographer of Shelley and Disraeli, was sent with his wife to New York on a priority passage to help with this propaganda work but Godfrey Haggard, Britain's Consul General in New York, soon reported, 'The
Maurois, especially she, are very anxious to get back to France .
2 The original questionnaires recorded by Andre
Maurois in A la recherche de Marcel Proust are reproduced in Cent ecrivains francaises repondent au "Questionnaire Marcel Proust", ed.