Jacques Prévert

Born in February 1900, Prévert spent decades moving between film sets and the page. Through the 1930s and '40s he wrote screenplays that helped define poetic realism, the kind of French cinema where longing and fog did as much work as the actors—Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945 became the peak of that. He didn't publish his first book until 1946, but once those poems appeared they spread fast: simple syntax, everyday images, a rhythm that stuck. By the time he died in April 1977, his lines had become the ones French students memorized first.