The Surrealist Parade: Literary history by Wayne Andrews

The Surrealist Parade: Literary history by Wayne Andrews

“The menace of surrealism was so frequently advertised that any reader of this book should be allowed the impudence of demanding my credentials.” So opens Wayne Andrews’s The Surrealist Parade, a portrait of the movement in literature and art by a man who, at the age of nineteen, began to correspond with its major figures and afterward came to know them well. Under the name of Montagu O’Reilly, Andrews wrote the surrealist fiction Pianos of Sympathy (1936), the very first New Directions book. In later years, Andrews became a social historian, art archivist, and scholar of architectural history, publishing no less than sixteen books, among them his well-known study of the cultural roots of Nazism, Siegfried’s Curse, and a pungent biography of Voltaire (meanwhile, Montagu O’Reilly had made a reappearance on the ND list in 1948 with Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?). When Andrews died in 1987, he had completed all but the last chapter of The Surrealist Parade, his portrait of a movement in art and literature that took in such disparate temperaments as André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Salvador Dalí. The book is, in the words of his lifelong friend and publisher, James Laughlin, a “little insider’s history… Montagu is very much behind Wayne in these caustic yet admiring sketches.”

Wayne Andrews, professor of art history at Wayne State University, is a prolific and nationally acclaimed author and photographer. His surveys of the architecture of New York, Chicago, the South, and New England and of American Gothic are well known; his Architecture, Ambition and Americans (1955) and Architecture in America (1960) remain basic works. His most recent book is a study of Voltaire, published in 1981 by New Directions.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780811211277
ISBN 10	0811211274
Title	The Surrealist Parade: Literary history
Author	Wayne Andrews
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Year published	1990-08-22
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.