Franklin Rosemont

Franklin Rosemont
Franklin Rosemont speaking at Loyola University, Chicago, 2007.

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 Henry, a labor activist, and Sally, a jazz musician.

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.

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).

External links

• Franklin Rosemont 1943–2009 This "cyber-tombeau" at Silliman's Blog by poet Ron Silliman includes comments, tributes, and links
• Remembering a Wobbly Surrealist an extensive tribute to Rosemont
• Franklin Rosemont, fellow worker, surrealist poet, great American comprehensive set of links to obituaries on Rosemont found around the web as of April 2009
• Franklin and Penelope Rosemont collection of IWW Publications at Newberry Library