Caillois' efforts paid off: he graduated as a normalien in 1933 before entering the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he came into contact with such eminent linguists as Georges Dumézil and Alexandre Kojève.

During these formative years Caillois extended his circle of friends that came to include many influential figures of the French intelligentsia like André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Michel Leiris or George Bataille.

In June 1939, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo whom he had met in Paris a few months earlier and with whom he engaged a close, life-long amorous friendship, Caillois left France for Argentina, where the start of World War II forced him to stay.

[2] There he played an active role against the spread of Nazism in Latin America through his conferences and his contributions to anti-fascist magazines such as Sur and Les Volontaires and as editor of the new periodical Lettres françaises.

In 1971 he is elected to the Académie française and publishes in 1978 a powerful 'imaginary' autobiography, Le fleuve Alphée [3] an award-winning autobiographical essay (Marcel Proust Awards and European Union Prize for Literature).

Today Caillois is also remembered for founding in 1952 Diogenes, an interdisciplinary quarterly journal edited in French, Spanish and English with initial funding by UNESCO and still published to this day.

Gambling is "like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph.

He formulates "in his peculiarly naturalist fashion what it would mean to act and create without the intervention of the sovereign ego, that magnificent artifact of the modern West that surrealism and the avant-garde have taken such drastic measures to counteract."

"[13] The Roger Caillois French Literary Prize for Latin American Literature was created in 1991 and has also been awarded to figures such as Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso and Adolfo Bioy Casares.