Jacques Prévert was born in 1900 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. When he had finished his schooling at age 15, he took a series of odd jobs, then joined the army in 1920, where he met Yves Tanguy and later Marcel Duhamel. In 1922 he returned to Paris, where he associated with the young leaders of the Surrealist movement: Desnos, Malkine, Aragon, Leiris, Artaud and André Breton. Eventually he broke with Breton. He is known for his poetry, which is simple and evocative, and known also as a screenwriter, collaborating on "Le Crime de Monsieur Lange" (1935) for Jean Renoir, for example, and "Les enfants du paradis" (1944) for Marcel Carné. Upon his death, Carné wrote of him in the New York Times that "His humor and poetry succeeded in raising the banal to the summit of art."

Prévert's poetry collections include Histoires (1946), Poèmes (1961) and some dozen others; his complete works were published in the Pléiade series by Gallimard in 1992.