French Jewish writer. He was the brother of Maurice Schwob and uncle of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob).
He was a true symbolist, with a diverse and an innovatory style. His name stands beside Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau, André Gide, Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Jules Renard, Alfred Jarry, Édouard Dujardin in French Literature.
He is the author of six collections of short stories: Cœur double (“Double Heart”, 1891), Le Roi au masque d’or (“The King in the Golden Mask”, 1892), Mimes (1893), Le Livre de Monelle (“The Book of Monelle”, 1894), La Croisade des Enfants (“The Children’s Crusade”, 1896), and Vies imaginaires (“Imaginary Lives”, 1896). Alfred Vallette, director of the leading young review, the Mercure de France, thought he was “one of the keenest minds of our time”, in 1892. Téodor de Wyzewa in 1893, thought it would be tomorrow’s taste in literature itself. Paul Valéry dedicated two of his works to him – Introduction à la Méthode de Léonard de Vinci and the Soirée avec M. Teste. Alfred Jarry dedicated his Ubu Roi to Schwob. Oscar Wilde dedicated to him his long poem “The Sphinx” (1894) “in friendship and admiration.” Jorge Luis Borges wrote that his book Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy, 1936) was inspired by Schwob’s “Imaginary Lives.”
Along with Stuart Merrill, Adolphe Retté, and Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob worked on Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, which was written in French to avoid a British law forbidding the depiction of Bible characters on stage. Wilde struggled with his French, and the play was proofread and corrected by Marcel Schwob for its first performance, in Paris in 1896.
He studied Gothic grammar under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1893-4, and later earned a doctorate in classic philology and oriental languages. His work pictures the Greco-Latin culture and the most scandalous characteristics of the romantic period. His stories catch the macabre, sadistic and the terrifying aspects in human beings and life.
He became sick in 1894 with a chronic incurable intestinal disorder He also suffered from recurring illnesses that were generally diagnosed as influenza or pneumonia and received intestinal surgery several times. In the last ten years of his life he seemed to have aged prematurely.
On 12 September 1900, in England, he married the actress Marguerite Moreno, whom he had met in 1895. Charles Whibley, the English writer, was a witness at the wedding.
His health was rapidly deteriorating, and in 1901 he travelled to Samoa, like his hero Stevenson, in search of a cure. On his return to Paris he lived the life of a recluse until his death on 26 February 1905. He died of pneumonia while his wife was away on tour.
Link to Wikipedia biography