Annal: 1971 National Book Award for Arts and Letters

The contradictions and paradoxes of Jean Cocteau, poet, novelist, playwright, and film-maker, can be called a deliberate scandal. The generosity and the egomania, the poise and the anguish of an opium-addicted homosexual, a man who knew everyone that mattered in the arts, and who climaxed an avant-garde life by entering, without seeming contradiction, the formidable conservative precincts of the Academie Francaise—all this is elegantly woven by Mr. Steegmuller into the tapestry of this award-winning and riveting biography.