Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-1889), French writer, one of the forerunners of the Symbolist Movement. He was born into a noble family in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, lived a precarious Bohemian life in Paris, and died in poverty. He is best known for his collection of short stories Contes cruels (1883; trans. 1927) and for the drama Axel (final form 1890; trans. 1925). His works, rejecting the prevailing naturalism and materialism of the day, reflect the Romantic and Symbolist interest in fantasy, the supernatural, and even the horrifying and shocking. They serve chiefly to express his idiosyncratic philosophical ideas.