Rosanna Warren. Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters.

I took Rosanna Warren's book to research a single fact: whether Nazi sympathizer Cocteau really launched a campaign to save Jacob as it has been portrayed in the movie "Picasso". I finished reading it with ashen face because of how vividly his slow demise in the clutches of Nazi terror machine was described in the book. When the French Police took him for handing him over to Gestapo, his landlady sighed: "And was it worth to pray so much?" (He absconded Judaism of his childhood and became a fervent Catholic). 

The book is somewhat light on his poetry (though, reading a few poems in Russian translation left me with the feeling that, unlike another catalyst of the new art, Guilliaume Apollinaire, his poetry was secondary in importance and this impression might be unfair) and heavy on his gay relationships. But, nevertheless it is a monument to a great man and a martyr. 

Jacob looks on his photographs exactly like his portraits or vice versa...