Born in Paris, Crevel was both sceptical of surrealism and a fervent supporter of André Breton's. He moved in fashionable circles, and kept company with Gide, Cocteau, and the Comte de Beaumont, keeping his homosexual tendencies discreet. Today Breton's aversion to the world, homosexuality, and the "bourgeois genre" is known. Their friendship endured nevertheless, probably because Breton admired Crevel's powerless revolt, one which could only end in mental illness or death.

Themes of circumcision, suicide and homosexuality recur in Crevel's autobiographical novels, though he was a bisexual. He described to his father how a perfect suicide might be presented as an accident, and his father killed himself in just that manner.

All Crevel's venom is reserved for mothers: "for the young French bourgeois, a mother is a piece o furniture".

Embarassingly good looking and charming, Crevel frequented quite different strata of society: surrealists, writers generally, the Communist Party and the rich and famous. He may have been the lover of the novelist Aragon long before the latter officially came out. Klaus Mann lusted after him.

His writing activities were punctuated by long sejourns in sanatoria because of tubercolosis. In failing health he commited suicide.