Jean Cocteau had a wide-ranging career as a poet, dramatist, screenwriter, and novelist. “Cocteau’s willingness and ability to turn his hand to the most disparate creative ventures,” James P. Mc Nab wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “do not fit the stereotypical image of the priestlike—or Proust-like—writer single-mindedly sacrificing his life on the altar of an all-consuming art. But the best of his efforts, in each of the genres that he took up, enriched that genre.” Among Cocteau’s most influential works are Parade, a seminal work of the modern ballet, La Machine infernale, a play that is still performed some sixty years after it was written, such films as La Belle et le bete and La Sang d’un Poete (The Blood of a Poet), and his novel Les Enfants terrible, a study of adolescent alienation. A National Observer writer suggested that, “of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.” Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf in the New York Times, “left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression.”