Promise At Dawn (Penguin Modern Classics)

Description:

'You will be a great hero, a general, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ambassador of France!'

For his whole life, Romain Gary's fierce, eccentric motherhad only one aim: to make her son a great man. And she did. This, his thrilling, wildly romantic autobiography, is the story of his journey from poverty in Eastern Europe to the sensual world of the Cote d'Azur and on to wartime pilot, resistance hero, diplomat, filmmaker, star and one of the most famed French writers of his age.

Review: Perhaps the only memorial by a son that raises the rare literary pleasure of laughter in the reader as a measure of appreciation. * The New Yorker *
A celebrated and infinitely seductive portrait of his early life, which is still often described as an unprecedented innovation in the writing of autobiography in France -- David Bellos
What a gold mine! -- Jean Paul Sartre
What talent, most certainly, how many ideas and passions too. You seize us and shake us. Ah! -- Charles de Gaulle

Author Biography: Romain Gary was one of the most important French writers of the 20th century. He won the once-in-a-lifetime honour the Prix Goncourt twice, the only person ever to have done so, by writing under a secret nom de plume. He was married to the American actress Jean Seberg and served in the RAF during the Second World War. He died in Paris in 1980 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.