The Collected Journals 1936-42 cover the years when the young David Gascoyne lived in Paris. Lawrence Durrell, George Barker and Henry Miller were early friends and he was actively involved in the surrealist movement with Andre Breton and the poet Paul Eluard. The journals give a full account of these years: his personal struggle and despair as world war loomed, his complex relationship with the English author Antonia White and his return to London and enlistment as an actor with E.N.S.A. Written in a period when he was producing some of his finest work, these journals illuminate and complement the poetry and serve to reaffirm Gascoyne as a major voice of the twentieth century.