Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker,
and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago.
He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group,
an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make
the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and
political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades,
Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of
declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other
interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new
generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.
Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of
the area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer
Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of
Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead
spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library
learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt
University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and
his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the
Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy
student movement at Roosevelt.