This important new translation brings the diary of Jean Cocteau to America for the first time. Diary of an Unknown was started in 1951, at about the time Cocteau begin his famous journals. This more personal document is at once intensely intimate and deeply philosophical. In these essays - which often recall the essays of Montaigne with their strictness of form, theme, and syntax - Cocteau reveals himself as never before. Like the Surrealists, Cocteau thrived upon, and solicited, public attention. But behind the flamboyance and the mystique, behind the public persona, there was the private self. Here we glimpse the private Jean Cocteau, playing with ideas and musing on all manner of subjects: nature ("I am more fascinated by the underside than by the topside"); New York ("a city that abides neither contempt nor pity"); poetry ("a religion without hope"); and beauty ("The beautiful is always the result of an accident"). Cocteau ruminates on psychoanalysis, the Nuremberg trials, the Trinity, freedom and the death penalty. He also returns to familiar Coctelian themes - angels, invisibility, friendship, memory, and the birth of ideas. He writes of Proust, Picasso, Stravinsky and Sartre, remembering conversations or recording his own observations on their work with extraordinary freshness of insight. In its breadth, its beauty, and its intimacy, DIary of an Unknown deepens our understanding of one of the most original artists of the century. -- from dust jacket.