Baldick, Robert

Joris-Karl Huysmans (18481907) is recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and acknowledged as principal architect of the fin-de-sicle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably <I>A Rebours</I> and <I>La-Bas</I>. <P> Robert Baldick translated many volumes from the French for Penguin Classics, including volumes by Diderot, Flaubert, and Verne, and wrote a biography of Huysmans. He died in 1972. <P> Patrick McGuinness is a fellow and tutor in French at St. Annes College, Oxford....