Defender of Manet and the other Impressionists, supporter of Zola and Rodin, Stephane Mallarme is nowadays regarded as one of the key figures of Modernism. Yet the man himself has remained strangely elusive, overshadowed by his reputation as an obscure and difficult writer. This text attempts to redress that balance. Arguing that Mallarme's writing and his life can only be fully understood in relation to each other, it weaves his own correspondence, unpublished family letters, other contemporary evidence and the works themselves into a narrative which sets the evolution of his poetic vision against the background from which it sprang, and revealing a different man from the cold, distant, bloodless aesthete which has so often been imagined.