Hugo Ball (1[zasłonięte]886-19)--poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, and mystic--was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, edited by John Elderfield, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with Elderfield's critical introduction and a new afterword, the original Dada manifesto, and a new selected bibliography of works by and about Hugo Ball and general works on Dada.