Louis Aragon, who died in 1982 at the age of eighty-five, was a quintessential twentieth-century French writer, involved in literature, politics, and painting to a degree rivaled only by Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux. Lacking Sartre's towering intellect and Malraux's visionary aesthetic detachment, Aragon was gifted with extraordinary talent for both poetry and fiction, a pure and vivid sense of the French language, and a remarkable capacity for work and for ideological optimism verging on bad taste. Like his great nineteenth-century predecessors Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, Aragon was oceanic, flawed, and ubiquitous. His opus--which includes poetry, fiction, autobiography, art criticism, literary theory, journalism, polemics, and history--forms a vast illustrated album of his time. World War I, the 1920s of Dada and surrealism, the rise of international communism and the doctrine of socialist realism, the advent of Hitler, the Spanish civil war, World War II and...