French · 1896–1966
French poet and critic who founded Surrealism and policed its boundaries. Trained in medicine, he served in psychiatric wards during World War I, where automatic writing experiments began. The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) proclaimed dreams and the unconscious as literature's true sources. Nadja, his most famous prose work, blurs fiction and autobiography through Parisian wandering. He expelled members, issued denunciations, and kept Surrealism coherent through force of personality. The movement he made spread worldwide; he remained its pope until death.