Robert Desnos was born in Paris in the neighbourhood of the Halles, which he celebrated in all his work. He was a great reader; in 1919 he published Prospectus, which was significantly influenced by Apollinaire. He was a member of a group that formed around André Breton at the beginning of the 1920s, and he participated in the birth of Surrealism. His writings testify to his taste for automatic writing and for language games, although he affirmed that dreams and desires were all-powerful. He was proficient in experiments concerning hypnotic sleep, in which the group was much interested, and he captivated his friends with prophetic words and mysterious drawings. L’Aumonyme and Le Langage cuit are evidence of his desire to regenerate language. He published several collections of poetry, including Corps et biens (1930), and he broke away from the surrealists. He was a supporter of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and later he fought with the Resistance. He wrote an autobiographical novel entitled Le vin est tiré… (1943) and the following year published Chantefables (1944). He was arrested on February 22, 1944, and sent to the concentration camp at Terezin, where he died of typhus on June 8, 1945.