Joris-Karl Huysmans

Huysmans spent more than three decades as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, writing fiction in the hours around a bureaucrat's schedule. He began as a disciple of Zola's naturalism, then broke with it entirely in À rebours (1884), whose plotless catalogue of aesthetic and sensory excess made him the movement's reluctant prophet and a lightning rod for critics who saw it as a corrupting text.

He spent his later years drifting toward the Catholic Church, documenting the conversion in En Route (1895) with the same obsessive attention to detail he'd once given to perfume and jewels. He died of cancer in 1907 as a lay Benedictine oblate, having traded decadence for devotion without changing his prose style at all.