He studied agricultural engineering, and worked as a statistician and agronomist before landing in the literary realm. The writer also worked in film, both as a screenwriter and director. Robbe-Grillet, who pioneered a style in the 1950s and 1960s called the "new novel," died Monday at a hospital in Caen, Normandy, according to his publisher, Fayard. He died in 2008.Alain Robbe-Grillet, known as the enfant terrible of the French literary establishment, has died at age 85. He wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais‘ L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad), now generally accepted as being one of the best post-war French films. He has also written and directed several films. Robbe-Grillet has remain associated with the nouveau roman throughout his career. Political commitment, as found in Sartre, Camus and other French writers was rejected. Characters, when they appeared, often appeared as streams of consciousness. Traditional characters also were questioned, with the focus on things, which created, they said, a new realism. First to go was the traditional role of the narrator, with the author intervening in the plot if that was felt necessary. The basic principles of the Nouveau Roman were that plot, character and narrative were old-fashioned. Robbe-Grillet was not only a writer of this kind of novel but also wrote about it and was an editorial director of Editions de Minuit, the publisher that published Robbe-Grillet and many other nouveau roman writers. He is now best known as one of the major writers.
In 1951, his first published novel – Les Gommes (The Erasers) – won an award and he was able to make a career as a writer. He wrote his first novel in 1948 but it was not published till 1978. In 1957 he married Cathérine Rstakian, an actress who has also published novels. However, he became ill and never returned to his profession, taking up full-time writing. After the war he worked as a an agronomist, including spells overseas. He attended the Institut National d’Agronomie but his studies were cut short when he was forcibly recruited under the German occupation to work as a lathe operator in a German tank factory.
His parents were atheists and extreme right-wing sympathisers. His father was an engineer, who owned a small factory.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in 1922 in Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon, now part of Brest.
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