Louis Aragon was a French poet who was one of the leading voices of the surrealist movement in France.
27 Facts About Louis Aragon
2.
Louis Aragon co-founded with Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault the surrealist review Litterature.
3.
Louis Aragon was a novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Academie Goncourt.
4.
Louis Aragon was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother, believing them to be his sister and foster mother, respectively.
5.
Louis Aragon was only told the truth at the age of 19, as he was leaving to serve in the First World War, from which neither he nor his parents believed he would return.
6.
Louis Aragon would remain a member for the rest of his life, writing several political poems including one to Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the PCF.
7.
Louis Aragon was critical of the USSR, particularly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during which Joseph Stalin's personality cult was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev.
8.
The French surrealists had long claimed Lewis Carroll as one of their own, and Louis Aragon published his translation of The Hunting of the Snark in 1929, "shortly before he completed his transition from Snarxism to Marxism", as Martin Gardner puts it.
9.
Apart from working as a journalist for L'Humanite, Louis Aragon became, along with Paul Nizan, editor secretary of the journal Commune, published by the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionnaires, which aimed at gathering intellectuals and artists in a common front against fascism.
10.
Louis Aragon became a member of the directing committee of the Commune journal in January 1937, along with Andre Gide, Romain Rolland and Paul Vaillant-Couturier.
11.
In March 1937, Louis Aragon was called on by the PCF to head the new evening daily Ce soir, which he was charged with launching, along with the writer Jean-Richard Bloch.
12.
Louis Aragon had met her in 1928, and she became his muse starting in the 1940s.
13.
Louis Aragon was mobilized in 1939, and awarded the Croix de guerre and the military medal for acts of bravery.
14.
Louis Aragon was one of several poets, along with Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Jean Prevost, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, etc.
15.
Louis Aragon's poetry was published along texts by Vercors, Pierre Seghers or Paul Eluard in Switzerland in 1943 after being smuggled out of occupied France by his friend and publisher Francois Lachenal.
16.
Louis Aragon participated with his wife in the setting-up of the National Front of Writers in the Southern Zone.
17.
Louis Aragon thus wrote, in 1954, Strophes pour se souvenir in commemoration of the role of foreigners in the Resistance, which celebrated the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main d'Oeuvre Immigree.
18.
At the Liberation, Louis Aragon became one of the leading Communist intellectuals, assuming political responsibilities in the Comite national des ecrivains.
19.
Louis Aragon celebrated the role of the general secretary of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, and defended the Kominform's condemnation of the Titoist regime in Yugoslavia.
20.
Louis Aragon's post did not protect him from all forms of criticism.
21.
Louis Aragon published the writings of dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera.
22.
In 1956, Louis Aragon supported the Budapest insurrection, provoking the dissolution of the Comite national des ecrivains, which Vercors quit.
23.
Beside his journalistic activities, Louis Aragon was CEO of the Editeurs francais reunis publishing house, heir of two publishing houses founded by the Resistance, La Bibliotheque francaise and Hier et Aujourd'hui.
24.
Louis Aragon directed the EFR along with Madeleine Braun, and in the 1950s published French and Soviet writers commonly related to the "Socialist Realism" current.
25.
Free from both his marital and editorial responsibilities, Louis Aragon was free to return to his surrealist roots.
26.
Louis Aragon died on 24 December 1982, his friend Jean Ristat sitting up with him.
27.
Louis Aragon was buried in the parc of Moulin de Villeneuve, in his property of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, alongside his wife Elsa Triolet.