Despite his central role in one of the most influential of modern art movements, André Breton, the “pope of Surrealism,” poet, essayist, polemicist, and intellectual agitator, has long remained an enigmatic and somewhat elusive figure. This seems all the more surprising when one considers that he lived out most of his life in public—in “a glass house,” to use his own words, and in a “glass bed, with glass sheets.”

In part this elusiveness has been owing to the fact that, until recently, much of the documentation of his more intimate life has not been available to researchers. (Indeed, the correspondence between Breton and poet-novelist Louis Aragon—dear friend and early Surrealist collaborator until the latter fully embraced Stalinism in 1932, after which Breton never spoke to him again—still remains under lock and key.) It also stems from the fact that Breton’s “public” self—as standard-bearer of Surrealism, but also as the first-person voice of the many prose works that combine essay, autobiography, lyric flights, and philosophical speculation—was actually a carefully crafted persona revealing very little of the real man, the charismatic if choleric leader who, despite his fierce and often arbitrary fulminations against fellow-Surrealists and friends, commanded, at least up to a point, their loyal and loving respect. But perhaps for more than any other reason, Breton’s character has defied posterity’s full comprehension because of the profound contradictions at the very heart of the man, contradictions which he indeed cultivated as part of his “artistic research” but probably understood far