Born to Pierre Nizan, a fairly prosperous railway engineer of illiterate Breton peasant stock, and Clémentine Nizan née Métour, a conventional, pious mother, Paul-Yves Nizan in his tragically curtailed life proved himself the best writer the French Communist party has so far had in its ranks and a classic twentieth-century novelist in his own right. His friend Jean-Paul Sartre was instrumental in rescuing his work from the oblivion imposed largely by the efforts of his former colleagues who wished to silence Nizan for leaving the party because of the Hitler-Stalin pact of mutual nonaggression in 1939. In the previous decade Nizan had worked hard, as a lycée teacher, a party militant, a journalist, a parliamentary candidate, and as a writer of fiction and essays, in order to serve the joint but often warring causes of communism and truthfulness.

A second child...