André Breton

About

André Breton (1896–1966), the son of a Norman policeman and a seamstress, studied medicine in Paris and was drafted to serve in World War I in 1915. While working on a neurological ward, he met Jacques Vaché, a devotee of Alfred Jarry, and Vaché’s rebellious spirit and suicide at the age of twenty-three would powerfully shape Breton’s sensibility. In 1919, along with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, he founded the journal Littérature . The Magnetic Fields , the first book of automatic writing, appeared in 1920, and in 1924, having broken with Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, Breton issued the Surrealist Manifesto . A Marxist, an atheist, and always a surrealist, Breton was a prolific author and a pugnacious controversialist whose works include the collection of poems Claire de terre and the novel Nadja .