Tristan Tzara is best known as the cofounder of the Dada movement and author of many of its most influential poems, plays, and manifestoes, including the famous Dada Manifesto. As a teenager, he published his first collection of poems in Romanian, then moved from Bucharest to Zurich, where he began to write in French. In 1919, Tzara brought Dada to Paris, where its bellicose hijinks flourished for several years. After the movement waned, Tzara wrote his epic Approximate Man, and joined the Surrealists for several years. During World War II, he stayed in France and participated in the Résistance. Over the span of half a century, Tzara published more than fifty-five books in French. He wrote as a poet, journalist, theorist, playwright, art critic, historian, and human rights advocate. He was an avid collector and scholar of Modern, African, and Oceanic art, and, late in his life, he wrote a groundbreaking literary study of the poetry of François Villon. When he died at the age of sixty-seven, after winning the prestigious Taormina prize in 1962, he left a humane and kinetic legacy that forever altered and still enlivens our Western perceptions and practice of poetry and art.
