In the first full-length biography in English of Andre Breton, the founder and prime theorist of the French Surrealist movement, Mark Polizzotti reveals the intellectual, artistic and personal life of one of our century's most influential and charismatic cultural figures, a man whom Eugene Ionesco dubbed "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought.".

This definitive work traces Breton's artistic career, from his participation in the Paris Dada group in the 1920s, through his seminal experiments with automatic writings and "induced slumbers," to the development of Surrealism proper and the literary, aesthetic, social, and political successes and scandals of that most influential modernist movement.

Polizzotti reconstructs Breton's intense and formative friendships with Man Ray, Duchamp, Dali, and Miro, among others; his legendary encounters with Trotsky, Freud, and Sartre; and his several marriages and love affairs.