Streetcorners ─ Prose Poems of the Demi-monde : Masterworks of Fiction 1911-1912

Born in New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Francis Carco began his life as a libertine youth in the streets of southern France, and when he moved to Paris in 1910 he began writing, producing Instincts, from which most of the works in this volume are taken. Among his Paris friends were poets and writers such as Max Jacob. Colette, and artists such as Utrillo, Modigliani, and Picasso. Through these years before the War. Carco became the personification of a true Bohemian, engaging in alcoholic jags and abusing his body with ether, opium and cocaine. In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. Carco was drafted into the military, and incarcerated for a short period for misconduct. After the war he returned to his old Paris haunts, writing longer fictions such as Jesus Candyboy, Perversity, and Noose of Sin. Indeed his writings on Paris street life became almost the standard of a tradition of fiction, prose works, photographs, and films that represented life in Montmartre and in the Bohemian quarters of Paris in the earth 20th century. Carco died in Paris in 1958.