Books By André Breton - Author

Founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the surrealist movement, the poet André Breton was born in Normandy in 1896. A medical student at the outset of the First World War, Breton served in the army at a neurological ward, where he treated patients for post-traumatic stress, including Jacques Vaché, whose iconoclastic views influenced him considerably. In post-war Paris, Breton sought out writers like Apollinaire and Reverdy, began a periodical Littérature with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and helped form a French contingent of Dada under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. But already Breton and his friends were moving beyond the absolute negation of Dada to Surrealism, a movement rooted in pure psychic automatism, desire, chance, poetry, and the marvelous. Under Breton's leadership, Surrealism became the most vital European avant-garde of interwar high modernism, its influence extending to Egypt, Japan, and the Caribbean. Exiled to the United States during the Second World War, due