Jean Follain was born in 1903, and raised in Normandy, France. His rural Norman childhood before and during the First World War became crucial for his writing. As he matured as a poet, he made it his project to preserve, as exactly as possible, this rural world, which was irremediably changed by the Great War and its aftermath. He had an exceptionally vivid and active memory - in poems a perception of some local and immediate event is not uncommonly coupled with a rush of memory. But he was no dreamy outsider: the excellence of his work as an attorney earned him in 1951 the High Court judgeship for the Ardennes region. He continued to live in Paris until his death in a street accident in 1971.