Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Persistence of Memory, completed in August 1931, is Dalí's best-known work. It depicts soft, melting pocket watches in a surrealistic landscape and has been widely interpreted as a rejection of the idea that time is rigid or fixed. Dalí said the image of clocks functioning symbolically came to him while contemplating a piece of Camembert cheese.
Salvador Dalí was born on the 11th of May 1904, at 8:45 in the morning, in the town of Figueres in the Empordà region of Catalonia, Spain. He died on the 23rd of January 1989, of cardiac arrest, at the age of 84.
Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, was a Russian immigrant ten years older than Dalí who was married to Surrealist poet Paul Éluard when she met Dalí in August 1929. She became his lifelong muse and wife, marrying him civilly on the 30th of January 1934 in Paris and in a Church ceremony on the 8th of August 1958. She acted as his business manager until her death on the 10th of June 1982, at the age of 87.
The paranoiac-critical method was Dalí's technique for deliberately inducing hallucinatory mental states while maintaining enough conscious control to paint their contents with precise, old-master draftsmanship. He developed it during his Surrealist period and it became a recognized contribution to the movement, described by André Breton as producing the most hallucinatory art made up to that point.
André Breton formally announced Dalí's expulsion in the May 1939 issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Breton cited Dalí's political positions and argued that the increasing refinement of his paranoiac-critical method contradicted the Surrealist principle of automatism. In 1949, Breton coined the derisive nickname "Avida Dollars," an anagram of "Salvador Dalí," mocking his commercialism.
Two major museums are devoted to Dalí's work. The Dalí Theatre-Museum is in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, and holds the largest collection of his work; Dalí himself began work on it in 1960, and it opened in 1974. The Salvador Dalí Museum is in St. Petersburg, Florida, and contains the collection of Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, including over 1,500 works and seven large masterworks.