Photograph from around 1895
"All the novels I've written since Against Nature are contained in embryo in that book. Its successive chapters are in effect simply the foundations of the books that followed."
—Joris-Karl Huysmans, Preface, written twenty years after the novel
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, better known as Joris-Karl Huysmans (5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907) was a French novelist and art critic and one of the members of the Decadent movement. He is best known for his novel A Rebours, a novel which about a disillusioned French aristocrat who furnishes his house according to his aesthetic preferences. At the meantime, he supported himself as a civil servant.
Huysmans is also known for his quadrilogy of novels centering on Durtal: Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898), and L'Oblat (1903).
