ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET Biography - Writers

 
 

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ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

Birth Date:1922                                 
Place of Birth:Brest, France                   
Nationality:French                             
Gender:Male                                     
Occupations:novelist, agronomist, screenwriter 
Born in Brest, in Brittany, on 18 August 1922, Alain           
Robbe-Grillet, the most influential French writer of his       
generation, is the son of Gaston Robbe-Grillet, owner of a     
small manufacturing business (himself the son of a             
school-teacher) and of Yvonne Canu Robbe-Grillet (the daughter 
of a navy petty-officer). He attended a Paris primary school   
and then lycĂ©es in Paris and Brest.                           
In 1942 he passed the competitive entrance examination for   
the prestigious Institut National d'Agronomie. In common with 
many young men of his generation too young to fight in the     
campaign that preceded the fall of France in 1940, he found   
himself forcibly recruited to work for the Germans under the   
STO, or compulsory labor scheme. This obligation interrupted   
his studies and took him to Nuremberg in Germany, where he     
worked as a lathe operator in a factory producing Panther     
tanks from July 1943 to August 1944. On graduation in 1945 he 
joined the staff of the Institut National de la Statistique