Robert Musil

Musil trained first as a military cadet, then as an engineer, then earned a doctorate in philosophy and psychology in Berlin, a scientist's training he brought directly into fiction. Young Törless (1906), a novel of institutionalized cruelty at a military boarding school, made his name before he'd turned thirty; he served as an Austrian army officer through the First World War.

The Man Without Qualities occupied the rest of his life: two volumes appeared in 1930 and 1933, but he kept revising and expanding it, unable to find its ending. Fleeing Austria after the Nazi annexation in 1938, he lived out his final years in Swiss poverty and near-total obscurity, still working on the manuscript. He died of a stroke mid-exercise in 1942; only a handful of mourners attended the funeral.