He is most known to the public for his satiric articles in newspapers such as Le Monde in which he wrote around twenty columns per month from 1949 to 1979.
As a specialist in English literature, he is the author of some fifty books between fiction and sociological essays and novels .
After World War II, he was Secretary General and Director of the French Institute of Latin America in Mexico.
[3] Robert Escarpit was an activist in the SFIO (Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière) at the time of the Popular Front.
In March 1990, he published in the daily Le Monde' his vision for the future of back then communist countries in relation to Perestroika.
Comparing the communist parties to useful churches to hear a different voice, but victims of their bureaucratic functioning and device preservation strategies, he quoted Ramiz Alia, successor of Enver Hoxha at the head of the Albanian Labor Party in September 1989 which reaffirmed that "...The debate and confrontation of ideas, solutions, alternatives, practices are quite normal".
He has published several novels, including the Young Man and Night (Jeune Homme et la nuit) (1980), and A beautiful day to die (Un si beau jour pour mourir) (1992).
He then wrote the trilogy of Travels of Azembat, seaman of Biscay (French: Voyages d'Azembat, marin de Gascogne).
In 1953, and with the agreement of Jean Bruel, founding director of the Bateau Mouche of Paris, Robert Escarpit wrote a biography of the fictional Jean-Sébastien Mouche, where he is both the collaborator of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the inventor of riverboats, and the creator of a police inspectorate specialized in intelligence, the "cookies".