The Divine Marquis: A Study of De Sade

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a rebel poet and general catalyst for the Paris avant-garde of his time, is often regarded as the spiritual forefather of Surrealism (it was he who, in fact, coined the term "surrealist" in 1917). In the early 1900s he began work at the Enfer section of the French national library, a forbidden section reserved for "banned" books, usually of a pornographic nature. Here Apollinaire became familiar with the suppressed works of writers such as Restif de la Bre...