Paris vagabond / Jean-Paul Clebert ; photographs by Patrice Molinard ; translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith ; foreword by Luc Sante.

Paris Vagabond is a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of outsiders beyond the social pale. Clebert's is a genuinely anarchist voice, a free spirit who was an intrepid explorer of a Paris that was in many places practically ruinous but where the poor were not yet completely marginalized. He was also a true writer's writer, hailed by his mentor and friend Blaise Cendrars and admired by Henry Miller, who said that reading Paris Vagabond "roiled my guts."

Translated from the French to English.