Louis Aragon (1897-1982) was a surrealist author, poet of the French Resistance during World War II, and the leading Communist writer in France.

Louis Aragon was born in Neuilly on Oct. 3, 1897. He was educated to be a physician. In 1917, while in the army medical corps, he met André Breton, who enlisted his support in the "surrealist revolution," a literary and art movement that emphasized the irrational and the unconscious. Aragon's poems and prose pieces of the 1920s are all strongly surrealist. The collections Feu de joie (Bonfire) and Mouvement perpétuel (Perpetual Motion) show not only the verbal gratuity that surrealism advocated but the lyrical transformation of humdrum reality as well. In prose, too, Aragon demonstrated the "daily marvelous" by drawing a veil of enchantment over a modern city, as in Le Paysan de Paris (1926; Parisian Peasant). In his essays he lambasted everything and everybody representing...