In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, as a counter to Surrealism and Dadaism, he founded a literary journal, "Le Grand Jeu". He is best known for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the truly bizarre Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Daumal's premature death of tuberculosis on May 21, 1944 in Paris, France was in all probability hastened by youthful experiments with a heady cocktail of drugs and psycho-active chemicals, the principal culprit amongst these no doubt being carbon tetrachloride.