Laurence Vail, novelist, poet, painter, and sculptor, was born in Paris on 28 January 1891 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1968. Known variously as the King of Montparnasse or the King of Bohemia, he is important for his Surrealist prose and his avantgarde art. He was described by Peggy Guggenheim as "always bursting with ideas," and he exerted a catalytic force on his many friends, among them Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.

His family had been connected with France for many generations: his great-grandfather had been a friend of Lafayette; his paternal grandfather, Adam Vail of New York, knew Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps and married a girl from Brittany; Vail's father, the commercially successful painter Eugene Lawrence Vail, was born in Paris and brought his son up to live like a Frenchman but think like an American. The most significant parts of Vail's education...