Born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, he died in 1988, in Paris. In 1929 he met André Breton and Paul Éluard and joined the surrealist group but distanced himself gradually from the mid 1930s on. Char joined the Résistance in 1940. He wrote about these events in his prose poems Feuillets d'Hypnos in an extraordinary manner. In the 1960s he joined the battle against the stationing of Atomic weapons in Provence.

Once France entered the war, Char set literary aspirations aside in favor of political and military commitment. He first served his country in a heavy artillery regiment, and later, after the occupation by Germany and the installation of the French Vichy authority, he went underground and became an active participant in the French Resistance movement. He did not publish works during the occupation but he did continue to write. One of his major works of the wartime years was Feuillets d'Hypnos (Leaves of Hypnos), a poetic journal of the war. Written between 1941 and 1944 and published in 1946, this volume established Char as an authentic resistance writer who had, to a greater extent than many of his literary peers, risked his life to stand up to Nazi and Vichy oppression.