Collection: Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos (1900–1945) was one of the leading lights of the surrealist movement and its most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His busy career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and would pass through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.