André Breton

André Breton was, in the words of Eugène Ionesco, "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought"; his actions and ideas became the pulse of the last great artistic movement of the twentieth century: surrealism. In this meticulous biography, Mark Polizzotti manages to break the glass that for so long was the intimate life of the so-called "black pope" of the surrealists. If Breton preferred to accentuate the most dramatic and unusual episodes of his life, Polizzotti excavates and presents his "empty moments", his hours of depression or weakness, in order to shed light on a dark fragment of human experience. This book lends an invigorating air to the figure of the revolutionary French poet, while facilitating a better understanding of the events that helped shape his life and thought.