Surrealist

An artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris, affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic.

Joyce Mansour was an Egyptian-French author and part of the inner circle of postwar surrealists. She wrote 16 books of poetry as well as prose works and plays. Mansour was born in Bowden, England, to Jewish...

Tristan Tzara was born in 1896, in Moineşti, Romania. He is best remembered as a cofounder and theoretician of Dadaism, an intellectual movement of the World War I era whose adherents espoused intentional ...

Poet and journalist Robert Desnos was born in Paris, France. The son of a successful café owner, Desnos rebelled against his father’s plans for a bourgeois education and pursued literature, idolizing authors...

Jean Cocteau had a wide-ranging career as a poet, dramatist, screenwriter, and novelist. “Cocteau’s willingness and ability to turn his hand to the most disparate creative ventures,” James P. Mc Nab wrote ...

André Breton was born in 1896 to a family of shopkeepers in Tinchebray, a small town in Normandy, France. He studied medicine and psychiatry, displaying a special interest in mental illness. Though he never...

Antonin Artaud, considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory, was born in Marseilles, France, and he studied at the Collège du Sacré-Cœur. He moved to Paris, where ...

Guillaume Apollinaire is considered one of the most important literary figures of the early twentieth century. His brief career influenced the development of such artistic movements as Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism...