Robert Desnos

Born in Paris in 1900, Robert Desnos was a poet who came to be associated with the Surrealists during the 1920s, but broke with the movement before André Breton’s Second Manifesto of 1930. During the 1930s he worked in radio and cinema. Desnos participated in a literary resistance group after France fell to the Nazis and until he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in 1944. He spent the last year of his life in multiple camps, and died of typhus in June of 1945. (Photo Credit: Project for Innovative Poetry)