Background
Robert was born in Paris and grew up in an old french block Saint-Merri, retained throughout his life a taste for slang, street songs, fairground spectacle, graffiti and so on.
Robert was born in Paris and grew up in an old french block Saint-Merri, retained throughout his life a taste for slang, street songs, fairground spectacle, graffiti and so on.
The first Desnos's poems were published in 1917 in La Tribune des Jeunes. At that time, he met Benjamin Perret who introduces him to Parisian Dadaists (Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault, Max Ernst and Francis Picabia). In 1919, as a columnist in a Paris newspaper, Desnos became an active member of the Surrealist group, working in the magazine "Surrealist Revolution".He breaks with the surrealists after the entry of André Breton and Paul Eluard the Communist Party, considering that surrealism is not compatible with the politics.After breaking with the Surrealists continues to work as a journalist in the press, he writes about film and jazz, and on the radio, where he created a radio series about Fantomas.
In 1922 his first book titled Rrose Sélavy, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, was introduced to France. Being a literary columnist for Paris-Soir, Desnos was a member of the Surrealist group and developed a particular talent for "automatic writing".
In 1932 he bagan working on the radio and created a show about Fantomas. Robert Desnos wrote critical reviews on cinema and jazz for many periodicals.
Since 1940 he participated in the French Resistance Movement, being published under various pseudonyms. Richard was arrested by the Gestapo February 22, 1944, passed several concentration camps, including Buchenwald, wrote poems there that have been lost, and died of typhus in the concentration camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, a month after the liberation of the camp.