André Breton, a twentieth-century French poet and essayist, also a novelist and founder and theoretician of the surrealist movement, was born in Tinchebray, Normandy, on 19 February 1896, died in Paris on 28 September 1966, and was buried in the cemetery of Batignoles. His family originated in Brittany and Lorraine. His first years were spent in Lorient on the Brittany coast, which was to leave in his poetry indelible impressions of shell-studded seashore and luminosity of sky. He was educated in Paris at the lycée Chaptal from 1906 to 1913 and entered medical school at the University of Paris on the eve of World War I. He continued his medical studies intermittently during the war years although he had been mobilized. He served in the ambulance corps and neurological wards for the war-injured in Nantes, in Saint-Dizier (in the region of the Marne), and later in Val-de-Grâce, where he...