Abstract
After the Second World War, Roger Caillois played a key role within UNESCO in the creation of a world heritage of literature. One of his initiatives was to have the classics translated, which involved drawing up a list of them, identifying the needs of different countries, understanding distribution methods and so on.
The notion of " representative works " was the subject of an initial meeting of experts in 1948. In the same vein, Caillois's work made South American literature better known, thanks to the collections he created for Gallimard, in a fruitful rivalry with Etiemble, who focused on Asian literature. In 1965, a conference organized by UNESCO reflected on the new values of literature, examining in particular the influence of cinema, mass culture and the introduction of oral language into works. The rich initiatives of the representative works program came to an end in the 1980s for financial reasons.
