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The article focuses on Surrealism of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Surrealism was essentially a literary movement, whose primary products were books, magazines, poems, letters and manifestoes. The legendary Surrealist exhibitions of the late 1930s and early 1940s were Surrealist in spirit and secondarily Surrealist in content. In 1942, for example, an exhibition called "The First Papers of Surrealism" was installed at the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue in New York, and those that attended it were far more likely to remember the show itself than any of the works on display.