Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a novelist and poet whose work combined rigorous experimentation with restless imagination and wry humor. His best-known works are perhaps Exercises in Style, Zazie dans le Metro, and One Hundred Billion Poems. Besides being known for his own work, he is also renowned for having co-founded, with François Le Lionnais, OuLiPo (Ouvroir de la Litterature Potentielle) in 1960, a forum which fostered experimentation based on various types of constraints, the most famous example of which being the total absence of the letter "e" in Georges Perec's novel La Disparition.