Raymond Queneau

Queneau ran briefly with André Breton's Surrealists in the 1920s before breaking with the group over its dogmatism, and spent his career instead pursuing an opposite instinct: rigor, constraint, mathematics applied to language. He worked for decades as an editor at Gallimard, eventually overseeing the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, while publishing novels and poetry on the side.

Exercises in Style (1947) retold one trivial bus encounter ninety-nine different ways, a party trick that became a genuine literary landmark. In 1960 he co-founded Oulipo with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, a workshop devoted to writing under self-imposed formal constraints, the group that would later shape Perec and Calvino. Zazie in the Metro, his most popular novel, sent a foul-mouthed girl loose across Paris and became a bestseller and a Louis Malle film.