Louis Parrot (1906–1948)

Louis Parrot was born to a family of artisans in Tours, France. His formal education ended when he was apprenticed at age 12, and he acquired learning and culture on his own. He worked as a clerk in a bank, and then in a bookstore in Poitiers. At age 15, he published his first collection of poems, Ode à Minerve meurtrière, which won a prize at the Jeux Florals de Touraine. Misery Farm, published in 1934, reaffirmed his talent and his vocation as a poet. He went to Spain as a reader at the University of Madrid, where he met many other writers and poets, including Paul Éluard. Together the two friends translated Federico Garcia Lorca's Ode to Salvador Dalí, published in 1938. During the Spanish Civil War, Parrot returned to France. He joined the staff of the newspaper Ce Soir (This Evening), founded by Jean-Richard Bloch and Louis Aragon, and later became its editor-in-chief. During World War II, his house in Clermont-Ferrand was a center for intellectuals in the Resistance. He was a co-founder of the underground literary journal l'Éternelle revue with Éluard and Jean Lescure. He published a monograph on Éluard in 1944, the first in the famous series Poètes d'aujourd'hui (Poets of Today) created by Pierre Seghers, and later contributed the volumes on Garcia Lorca (1947) and Blaise Cendrars (1948), In 1945, he published L'Intelligence en guerre, 1940-1945, the first comprehensive work on intellectual and artistic resistance during the German Occupation. Parrot also wrote three novels and several collections of short stories and essays. He died at age 41 in 1948.