André Breton  André Robert Breton (; 18 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the co-founder, leader, principal theorist and chief apologist of Surrealism. His writings include the first "Surrealist Manifesto" ("Manifeste du surréalisme") of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism". Only son born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, France. His father, Louis-Justin Breton, was a policeman, tolerant, good-natured and atheistic, and his mother, Marguerite-Marie-Eugénie Le Gouguès, was a former seamstress, cold, domineering, inclined to self-righteous bigotry and a strict disciplinarian. Breton attended medical school, where he developed a particular interest in mental illness. His education was interrupted when he was drafted for World War I. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide when aged 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled "Lettres de guerre" (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays. Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The apartment on rue Fontaine (in the Pigalle district) became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art. He was an atheist. Breton launched the review "Littérature" in 1919, with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also associated with Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In 1924, he was instrumental in the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research. In "Les Champs Magnétiques" ("The Magnetic Fields"), a collaboration with Soupault, he implemented the principle of automatic writing. He published the "Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, and was editor of the magazine "La Révolution surréaliste" from that year on.