Raymond Radiguet

Novelist and poet, born in Saint-Maur, NC France. A precocious protégé of Jean Cocteau, he took Paris by storm with his poetry and drama as a teenager, but is best known for his masterpieces Le Diable au Corps (1923, The Devil in the Flesh) and Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel (1924, trans Count Orgel Opens the Ball). He led a dissipated life and died of typhoid.

Raymond Radiguet (June 18, 1903 – December 12, 1923) was a French author. An anecdote told by Ernest Hemingway has an enraged Cocteau charging Radiguet (known in the Parisian literary circles as "Monsieur Bébé" - Mister Baby) with decadence for his tryst with a model: "Bébé est vicieuse.

In early 1923 Radiguet published his first and most famous novel, Le Diable au corps (The Devil in the flesh). Critics, who initially despised the intense publicity campaign for the book's release (something not normally associated with works of literary merit at the time), were finally won over by the quality of Radiguet's writing and his sober, objective style. At the age of 20, Radiguet had died the previous year of typhoid fever, which he contracted after a trip he took with Cocteau.

In 1947 Claude Autant-Lara released his film Le diable au corps, based on Radiguets's novel, and starring Gérard Philipe. Among the other cinematic versions of Radiguet's story, the heavily adapted one by Marco Bellocchio, Il diavolo in corpo (1986), became notable as one of the first mainstream films to show unsimulated sex.