Georges-André Malraux, the French author, critic, revolutionist, and statesman, was born in Paris to a well-to-do family. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and the Institut des Langues Orientales and early in life developed an enduring interest in archaeology, art, and Oriental languages and thought. His life and writing were characterized by a restless, questioning, quasi-apocalyptic intensity that is fully understandable only in terms of the crisis with which Western thought was confronted in the first half of the twentieth century: At grips with a fast-accumulating mass of new knowledge, Western civilization was seeking to adjust to the violent changes that had disrupted its former social, intellectual, and spiritual framework of values.

In 1923 Malraux went on an archaeological expedition into the Cambodian jungle, and soon afterward he returned to the Orient to participate in the revolutionary struggle that was...