Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet trained as an agricultural engineer and spent his twenties conducting banana and tropical-fruit research for French colonial institutes in Morocco, Guinea, and the Caribbean, a scientist's habit of neutral measurement he carried straight into fiction. Conscripted for forced labor in Germany during the war, he returned to France and, sidelined by illness from further fieldwork, took a job as a literary adviser at the publisher Éditions de Minuit.

There he championed and defined the nouveau roman, writing manifestos alongside novels that refused psychology, metaphor, and conventional plot in favor of exhaustively described surfaces. Jealousy (1957) is the movement's severest experiment. He later wrote and directed his own films, beginning with the screenplay for Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and died in Normandy in 2008.