Orphaned during the
First World War, Nadeau attended the
École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where he discovered politics. In 1930, he joined the
French Communist Party, where he worked with
Georges Cogniot. He was expelled from the party in 1932. He then read
Lenin and
Leon Trotsky, which inspired him to join the
Ligue Communiste, a Trotskyist party created by
Pierre Naville. In this period, he frequently met
Louis Aragon,
André Gide,
André Breton,
Jacques Prévert and
Benjamin Péret. Made a teacher of literature in 1936, he taught until 1945, briefly as a teacher of literature in
Prades, but he preferred to be a schoolteacher in
Thiais in order to move closer to Paris. He then collaborated with André Breton on the review
Clé, which protested against the internment in France of Spanish republicans in the early phases of the
Spanish Civil War. After a brief period of mobilization, he returned to teaching during the Nazi occupation and engaged in clandestine political activities. His resistance network (which included a German soldier who would be executed) was dismantled in the course of a raid.
David Rousset and several of his other members were deported. Rousset's wife helped Nadeau to escape deportation. This first part of his life led to the publication in 1945 of his
Histoire du surréalisme (
History of Surrealism) published in the United States in 1965 and the United Kingdom in 1968). 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. He ran the literary page for seven years and brought to prominence authors such as
Georges Bataille,
Jean Genet,
René Char,
Henri Michaux,
Claude Simon and
Henry Miller. He also began editing the works of the
Marquis de Sade. He stunned his contemporaries by coming to the defense of
Louis-Ferdinand Céline. 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. ==References==