L’Homme précaire et la Littérature

The last text written by André Malraux, this book marks the final stage of a body of thought that had never ceased to interrogate art, culture and the destiny of civilizations. In the form of a free, subjective and passionate meditation on literary history since the nineteenth century, Malraux summons its great figures — Balzac, Baudelaire, Hugo, Proust — in the service of a vast argument: to understand how the forms of literature reflect the anguish, precariousness and metamorphoses of modern man.

Weakened by illness, Malraux completed this text in the autumn of 1976, knowing he was close to the end. It was Sophie de Vilmorin, his last companion, who herself brought the manuscript to Gallimard at the end of October. Malraux died on 23 November 1976, three months before the book’s publication.