André Malraux

At the age of seventeen he shocked his parents by abandoning his high-school studies, going on in just three years to become a prosperous rare-book publisher, a keen literary critic, and an author of fantastic fiction. He then turned himself into a self-taught archaeologist and staged a bold statue-lifting raid on an abandoned Cambodian temple - an exploit which catapulted him to notoriety when he was only twenty-three.