Louis Aragn – Biography of Louis Aragn

Louis Marie Alfred Antoine Aragon, an important figure in the avant-garde movements that shaped French literary and visual culture in the 20th century, was born in the Beaux Quartiers district of Paris on October 3, 1897. His parents were not married and Aragon grew up believing that his mother was his sister, his father his guardian, and his grandmother his foster mother.

A precocious student, Aragon completed his first novel as a child and later studied at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he earned degrees in Latin and philosophy. In 1917, he enrolled at the Paris Faculty of Medicine and met André Breton. Writing of Aragon it also caught the attention of Guillaume Apollinaire during this time. Aragon He was drafted into the First World War, eventually winning a medal for bravery, and soon began writing poems.

In 1919, Breton and Aragon they edited the first issue of Littérature with fellow poet Philippe Soupault, giving birth to the Parisian version of Dada. Aragon organized Dada events throughout the 1920s, publishing collections of poetry such as Feu de joie (1920) that reflected a Dada interest in the absurd. He also began publishing novels like Anicet ou the panorama (1921) and Les Aventures de télémaque (1922). In the mid-1920s, Aragon and Breton had focused their attention on surrealism. Le Mouvement perpétuel, poems of Aragon (1920–1924) was a manifesto and a poetics of the new movement. In the work Le Con d’Irène (1928), Aragon spoke about the influence of automatic writing: “What I am thinking naturally expresses itself. Each person’s language is different from each one. For example, I don’t think without writing, which means that writing is my method of thinking.“.

In 1928, Aragon he also met Elsa Triolet, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s sister-in-law. Aragon and Triolet fell in love and remained committed to each other, and increasingly to radical politics, for the rest of their lives. Triolet’s commitment to communism strengthened Aragon, and began his series Le Monde reel, a surreal political work that uses social realism to attack bourgeois literary and cultural norms. The books that make up the series are frequently seen as forerunners of the Roman nouveau movement in French literature of the 1960s. Aragon he was drafted into World War II and again won praise for his bravery, including leading a daring 30-man breakout from German forces.

Demobilized in 1940, he worked for the resistance, writing brochures, editorials, and poetry. After the war he wrote several non-fictional studies, monographs, translations, and books on history, politics, art, and culture. In all, he would publish more than 100 books during his lifetime, as well as several posthumous volumes. He was one of the most important writers in postwar France, and both his spirit and his writing did much to shape the intellectual landscape. He continued to write prolifically until his death on December 24, 1982.