Robbe-Grillet is a French writer, screenwriter and director, the founder of the literary movement called New Novel. He studied math and biology. After graduating from the French National Institute of Agriculture in 1945 he started to engage in scientific research in agronomy but soon decided to try writing. He published his first novel The Erasers (Les Gommes) in 1953. He wrote the screenplay for one of the most famous films by Alan Resnais Last Year in Marienbad (L' année derničre ŕ Marienbad, 1961). Two years later he made his directing debut with the feature film L' immortelle (1963). The complex structure of both films is close to the guidelines of the New Novel movement that honored the traditional structure of the plot and time sequence. Afterwards he made Trans-Europ-Express (1966), The Man Who Lies (L' homme qui ment, 1968), Eden and After (L' éden et aprčs, 1970), N. a pris les dés... (1971), Successive Slidings of Pleasure (Glissements progressifs du plaisir, 1974), Playing with Fire (Le jeu avec le feu, 1975), The Beautiful Prisoner (La belle captive, 1983), The Blue Villa (Un bruit qui rend fou, 1995) which he co-directed with Dimitrij de Clercq his last film It's Gradiva Who Is Calling You (C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle, 2006). Besides writing novels and screenplays and directing, Robbe-Grillet worked as a professor. From 1980 to 1988 he managed the Center for Sociology and Literature in Bruxelles and from 1971 to 1995 he taught a seminar about his own novels at the University of New York. He was accepted to the French Academy in 2004 but never formally received the honor due to his disagreement with the awarding procedure.