Joris karl huysmans biography definition

HUYSMANS, JORIS-KARL (1848–1907), French fin-de-siècle novelist and art critic.

Joris-Karl (Charles-Marie-Georges) Huysmans was the son of a Dutch painter and a French musician.

During his life he never ceased to emphasize his parents' joint influence, which he felt was so important to him and that had made him, as he said in his 1885 autobiography, "an inexplicable amalgam of a Parisian aesthete and a Dutch painter." This mixture appeared for the first time in 1874 when Huysmans published a collection of prose poems entitled Le Drageoir à épices (A dish of spices), a volume bearing the name of Jorris-Karl Huÿsmans, a name he thought to be the Dutch form of Charles-Georges Huysmans.

Although LeDrageoir is a "skillfully cut jewel" as French poet Theodore de Banville described it, the volume aroused hardly any interest.

Huysmans had more success with Marthe, histoire d'une fille (1876; Marthe), a novel published outside of France, in Brussels, beca