Alfred Jarry

Alfred Jarry, born in Laval in Mayenne on 8 September 1873 and dead on 1 November 1907, was a French symbolist writer. He is best known for the play Ubu Roi of 1896, often cited as a forerunner of Dada, Surrealism and Futurism in the 1920s and 1930s and later of the theatre of the absurd of the 1950s and 1960s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of pataphysics. His mother came from Brittany. Jarry wrote in a variety of hybrid genres and styles, including novels, poems, short plays, comic operas, absurdist essays and speculative journalism, and his texts are considered examples of absurdist literature and of postmodern philosophy ahead of their time.