Franklin Rosemont



Franklin Rosemont (2 October 1943 – 12 April 2009) was a poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Over four decades, Franklin produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions intended to inspire a new generation of revolution, and became perhaps "the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States."

Early life
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, to father Henry, a labor activist, and mother Sally, a jazz musician.

Career
He edited and wrote an introduction for What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of Andre Breton, and edited Rebel Worker, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, The Rise & Fall of the DIL Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot and Juice Is Stranger Than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim. With Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon he edited The Forecast is Hot!. His work has been deeply concerned with both the history of surrealism (writing a forward for Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth) and of the radical labor movement in America, for instance, writing a biography of Joe Hill.

Publications
Rosemont is the author of the poetry collections ''The Morning of a Machine Gun|The Morning of a Machine Gun: Twenty Poems & Documents. Profusely Illustrated By the Author., The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye, and Penelope: A Poem, as well as An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers'', a book that explores the phenomenon of "wrong numbers" from a surrealist perspective, which was published by Black Swan Press in 2003. He also edited and introduced Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & other agitators & outsiders in 1920s/30s Chicago, by Frank O. Beck.