Arthur Rimbaud

Born in Charleville in 1854, Rimbaud excelled as a student and started writing young, then ditched formal education in his teens to run toward Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. In his late adolescence he produced nearly all his literary output—including A Season in Hell and Illuminations—while locked in a hectic, sometimes violent two-year romance with the poet Paul Verlaine. At twenty he assembled Illuminations and stopped writing literature entirely. He spent the next seventeen years travelling three continents as a merchant and explorer, a restless libertine turned trader, until cancer…