Raymond Gay-Crosier and Ben Stoltzfus Collection on Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker most associated with the Nouveau Roman literary trend. Robbe-Grillet was born on August 18, 1922 in Brest (Finistère, France) to a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. During the years 1943 and 1944, Robbe-Grillet participated in compulsory labor in Nuremberg, where he worked as a machinist. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea, Guadeloupe, and Morocco. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française in 2004, but was never formally received because of disputes regarding the reception procedures. He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems on February 18, 2008. A fuller biography is available at Wikipedia.

Collector Raymond Gay-Crosier was born in Basel Switzerland on August 30, 1937. He studied at the Universities of Basel, Paris (Sorbonne) and Bern, Switzerland, where he received his doctorat-ès-lettres in 1965 with a dissertation on Albert Camus's theater. Gay-Crosier began teaching at the University of Florida as an Associate Professor in 1967. He primarily covered the field of 20th-century French literature and was promoted to full Professor in 1973. In 2003, he retired as Professor Emeritus in order to devote his time to the contributions and direction of the projected four-volume Pléiade edition of Albert Camus's Œuvres complètes. See Gay-Crosier's full biography for more.

Ben Stoltzfus is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, and French at the University of California, Riverside. He is an internationally recognized Robbe-Grillet, Hemingway, and Magritte scholar; also a novelist, poet, and translator. His fiction, poetry, essays, scholarly articles, and reviews have appeared in some 150 journals and literary reviews, such as Chelsea, North Dakota Quarterly, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Mosaic, Modern Fiction Studies, New Novel Review, Fiction International, Symploke, Les Lettres Modernes, and many others. He has been honored with a variety of grants and fellowships (Fulbright, Camargo, Creative Arts, Humanities), is listed in Who's Who, received an Honorary Doctor of Letters in 1974, from Amherst College, and, in 2006, was honored with the Distinguished Emeritus Award from the University of California, Riverside. He 2013 he became an Edward A. Dickson Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Stoltzfus has a BA from Amherst College (1949), an MA in French from Middlebury College (1954), and a PhD in French from The University of Wisconsin (1959). He spent one year on a Fulbright Grant studying at The University of Paris (1955-56). He has taught at The University of Wisconsin (1956-58), Smith College (1958-60), and The University of California, Riverside (1960-97).

Stoltzfus' published books and monographs of literary criticism: