Born in Paris in 1848 and acknowledged as a principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination, Joris-Karl Huysmans was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably A Rebours (1884) and La-Bas (1891). Huysmans died in 1907.
Robert Baldick (d.1972) translated widely from the French and wrote a biography of Huysmans.
Patrick McGuinness is a Fellow and Tutor in French at St Anne's College, Oxford, and editor of Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siecle (Exeter UP, 2000).