Dali was named after his dead brother. His parents had a son called Salvador who died at twenty-two months, then gave the same name to the boy born nine months later. They took him to visit the grave. He later claimed he believed himself to be the reincarnation of the first Salvador, which may have been true or may have been Dali doing what Dali did: turning biography into performance.

He entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid at seventeen and was expelled twice. The first time for inciting a student riot. The second time, in 1926, for announcing that none of the faculty were competent to examine him. While in Madrid he read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and later called it one of the most important discoveries of his life. He began inducing hallucinatory states through a method he called 'paranoiac-critical': staring at objects until they transformed into something else, then painting what he saw.

The Persistence of Memory, the one with the melting clocks, was painted in 1931. He was twenty-seven. The clocks were not, as commonly assumed, a reference to Einstein. Dali said they were inspired by Camembert cheese melting in the sun. He joined the Surrealists in Paris but was eventually expelled by Andre Breton (Dali attracted expulsions) for political ambiguity and, more practically, for being impossible to control.

Gala Eluard became his wife, manager, muse, and business partner. She had previously been married to the poet Paul Eluard, and her departure for Dali divided the Surrealist circle. Together they built a career that crossed painting, film (Un Chien Andalou with Bunuel), fashion (the lobster telephone, Mae West's lips sofa), advertising, and later the Chupa Chups lollipop logo. He designed the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueres on the ruins of the town theatre that had been destroyed in the Civil War. He is buried there, beneath the stage.