French Literature Reviews - 2026
W. Langlois, André Malraux in Search of the Kingdom of Sheba
Writers: Biography, Letters and Memoirs
André Malraux in Search of the Kingdom of Sheba
Walter G. Langlois
PUBLICATION DATE: 03/03/14 PUBLISHER: Jean-Michel Place (Nvelles Ed) ISBN: 978-2-85893-948-0 EAN: 9782858939480. 320 pp.
A writer of humble origins, eager for recognition: André Malraux. An aviator, World War I hero, and upper-bourgeois seeking adventure: Édouard Corniglion-Molinier. A mythical woman with the beauty of dawn: the Queen of Sheba. A fabulous land, that of the Phoenix: Arabia Felix. The 1930s with their new geopolitical and industrial stakes: oil and aviation.
Over dinner, Malraux announces his imminent departure for an expedition to discover Marib, the ancient capital of Sheba. What he presents as a thoroughly planned operation is, at this stage, merely a product of his mythomania. André Malraux
in Search of the Queen of Sheba captures an adventure that takes us from historical and literary research to locate the Capital to the heroic return of the two protagonists to Paris, by way of the politically turbulent preparations for the expedition and the two men's flight over the Horn of Africa and the Yemeni desert.
A professor of literature and a scholar of Malraux, Walter Langlois recounts in this essay a journey to the boundaries of the self—the Book for Malraux, life for Corniglion-Molinier.
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An article on this work can be read on Alamblog:
This essay examines a distinct episode in the life of André Malraux, tracing the trajectory from his initial imaginative declarations over dinner to the realities of preparation and flight. Alongside Édouard Corniglion-Molinier, Malraux navigated a complex landscape marked by the geopolitical and industrial developments of the 1930s, including the growing significance of aviation and oil. Walter G. Langlois follows the pair through the politically turbulent phases preceding their journey, their aerial transit above the Horn of Africa and the Yemeni desert, and their eventual return to Paris. Readers interested in twentieth-century French literary figures and biographical studies of André Malraux may find this essay relevant to their broader reading.