He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris.

He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu.

These books are very different from his later, more famous pieces: they are inspired by Spanish romances and the heroic novels of the preceding century, with a certain mixture of the marvelous.

His friendship with Antoine Houdar de La Motte introduced him to the Mercure, the chief newspaper of France, and he started writing articles for it in 1717.

His work showed the first signs of what is now called "marivaudage," the flirtatious bantering tone characteristic of Marivaux's dialogues.

[2] In 1742 he became acquainted with the then-unknown Jean-Jacques Rousseau, helping him revise a play, Narcissus, though it wasn't produced till long afterwards.

He was extremely good-natured but fond of saying very severe things, unhesitating in his acceptance of favours (he drew a regular annuity from Claude Adrien Helvétius) but exceedingly touchy if he thought himself in any way slighted.

For the next twenty years, he contributed occasionally to the Mercure, wrote plays and reflections (which were seldom of much worth), and so forth.

Crébillon also described Marivaux's style as an introduction of words to each other which have never made acquaintance and which think that they will not get on together (this phrase is itself rather Marivaux-esque).

This fantastic embroidery of language has a certain charm, and suits the somewhat unreal gallantry and sensibility which it describes and exhibits.

In the French film L'Esquive (2003), directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, Arab-French adolescents in a Paris suburb prepare and perform Marivaux's play Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard.