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Biography
French

Raymond Queneau

1903 — 1976

Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, and co-founder of the Oulipo literary group. His work — including Exercises in Style (1947), Zazie in the Metro (1959), and The Flight of Icarus (1968) — combines formal experimentation with playful humor and a deep interest in mathematics and language. Exercises in Style, which tells the same trivial story in 99 different ways, is one of the most inventive literary works of the twentieth century.

Past sales0
PeriodModern
NationalityFrench
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was born on 21 February 1903 in Le Havre, France. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and was briefly associated with the Surrealists before breaking with André Breton.

Life and Career

Le Chiendent (The Bark Tree, 1933) — his first novel, a reworking of Descartes’ Discourse on Method as fiction — established his interest in the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, and literature. Exercices de style (Exercises in Style, 1947) — in which the same anecdote about a man on a bus is told ninety-nine times in ninety-nine different styles — is his most celebrated work.

Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the Metro, 1959) — about a foul-mouthed girl’s visit to Paris — is his most popular novel, adapted into a 1960 Louis Malle film. In 1960, Queneau co-founded the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) with François Le Lionnais, a group dedicated to creating literature under formal constraints.

Major Works and Themes

Queneau wrote about language, mathematics, philosophy, and the pleasures of constraint. He is the godfather of constrained writing — the literary tradition that includes Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Harry Mathews.

Key Works

  • Exercises in Style (1947)
  • Zazie in the Metro (1959)

Collecting Queneau

French originals (Gallimard) are the primary collected form. English translations (New Directions, Barbara Wright’s translations) bring $10–$30. Queneau died in 1976.