Franklin Rosemont

Franklin Rosemont

Franklin Rosemont speaking at Loyola University, Chicago, 2007.

Franklin Rosemont (2 October 1943 – 12 April 2009) was an American poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group.[1] 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."[2]

Early life

He was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Henry, a typograher and labor activist, and Sally, a jazz musician.[3] He attended Roosevelt University studying under St. Clair Drake.[4]

Career

He edited and wrote an introduction for What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of André 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: 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.[5]

Rosemont, Franklin (2002). Joe Hill. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. ISBN 0-88286-265-0. 

In 1990 he published a collected edition of short stories by the socialist utopian author Edward Bellamy, titled Apparitions of Things to Come. He is co-editor, with Archie Green, David Roediger, and Salvatore Salerno, of The Big Red Songbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007).

References

  1. ↑ The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont by Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib, April 16, 2009
  2. ↑ The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont by Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib, April 16, 2009
  3. ↑ Bio
  4. ↑ Ruff, Allen (2011). We Called Each Other Comrade: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers. Oakland: PM Press. p. x.
  5. ↑ Beck, Frank O. (2000). Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & other agitators & outsiders in 1920s/30s Chicago. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.

External links

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