André Breton (French, 1896–1966) was a French writer, poet, original member of the Dada group, and founder of the Surrealist movement. After a brief medical career, Breton moved to Paris in the early 1920s and joined the city's artistic avant-garde. In 1924, inspired by the writings of Sigmund Freud, he wrote the Manifeste du surréalisme, in which he championed free expression and the exploration of the subconscious mind.

Breton encouraged various unconventional techniques, including Automatism—spontaneous writing, drawing, and painting—to elucidate the unconscious processes believed to be crucial in understanding the human mind. He was also one of the co-founders of Littérature, an influential journal that featured the first written example of automatism, titled Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields). He also helped promote artists such as Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973), Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983), and Max Ernst (German, 1891–1976) by publishing their work in the journal La Révolution Surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).

In the 1920s and 1930s, Breton composed two additional Surrealist manifestos, as well as poetry and fiction. His most famous novel, Nadja (1928), is a fantastical love story between the narrator and a mysterious, mentally unstable woman.

In the late 1920s, Breton joined the French Communist Party. He left the party in 1935, but remained committed to Marxist philosophy. In 1938, he traveled to Mexico, where he and revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky collaborated on Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which examines the relationship between art and social upheaval. Fleeing from World War II, Breton left France in the early 1940s, and lived in the United States for several years, where he organized a groundbreaking exhibition of Surrealist Art at Yale University. After the war, Breton returned to Paris, where he continued to publish more poetry collections and essays on Surrealism.

In his later years, he divided his time between a house in the southwest France and an apartment in Paris. He died in Paris in September 1966. Today, his works can be found in the collections of public and private institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Musée Cantini in Marseills.