Henri Michaux (1899–1984), born in Belgium, studied mysticism as a young man and traveled throughout South America and Asia before settling in Paris. He wrote more than twenty volumes of poetry and prose and showed paintings he created under the influence of mescaline. In 1965 he was awarded the French National Prize for Letters but refused the award, saying that it threatened his independence. Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Co., Sylvia Beach was a luminary in the Parisian literary scene and the first publisher of Ulysses by James Joyce.

"Michaux excels in making us feel the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."