Antonin Artaud

French writer and theoretician, a poet and playwright whose ideals were Baudelaire and Poe. At 14 he founded a little magazine with friends. As an adult, he founded the Theatre of Life/Theater of Cruelty. Artaud was plagued by physical and mental hardships throughout his life. He nearly died from meningitis at the age of five and suffered the rest of his life with severe headaches and neurological pains, becoming addicted to drugs. He suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in 1937. Confined most of the remainder of his life to asylums, he gained his final release in 1946, two years before his death on 4 March 1948.