born Feb. 21, 1903, Le Havre, France
died Oct. 25, 1976, Paris
French author.
After working as a reporter, he became a reader for the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade , a scholarly edition of past and present classical authors; by 1955 he was its director. Verbal play, black humour, pessimism, and a derisive posture toward authority appear often in his more than 30 works of prose and poetry, which include the novels Zazie dans le métro (1959; film, 1960), perhaps his best-known work, and The Blue Flowers (1965).