Rimbaud

An astute and engrossing biography from the author of Victor Hugo and Balzac Granam Robb’s brilliant biography moves Rimbaud on from his perpetual adolescence where our imaginations have held him to show the extent of his transformations. From phenomenally precocious schoolboy he became Europe’s most shocking and exhilarating poet, author of poems that range from the exquisite to the obscene. But this brief, five-year period as the enfant-terible of French literature is only one small side of Rimbaud’s story. Robb takes us on a biographical journey through three continents and many different identities. Rimbaud emerges from this stunning work of biographical scholarship and historical imagination as an even more complex, ambiguous and fascinating figure than ever before.

Author Biography

Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958. He has published widely in nineteenth-century French literature and his highly acclaimed adaptation of Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler’s biography of “Baudelaire” appeared in 1989. His biography of “Balzac” was published by Macmillan in 1994 and his “Victor Hugo” won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Award and the Whitbread Biography Award in 1997. He lives in Oxford.