Eluding easy categorization, French poet, essayist and autobiographer Julien Michel Leiris was affiliated with literary Surrealism, Existentialism and ethnography. Involved with the surrealist movement through his friendships with André Masson (1896–1987), Max Jacob (1876–1944) and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Leiris published texts of surrealist inspiration such as Simulacre (1925), which featured Masson’s lithographs; Le Point cardinal (1927), ‘a prose narrative of erotic transcendence’ (Hand 29); and Aurora (1946), his only novel, which was written two decades earlier.