He was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans on February 5, 1848, in Paris, the only child of a French mother and Dutch father. He earned his degree under a private tutor, studied law at the University of Paris, and worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained for thirty-two years.

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A cosmopolitan man of refined taste and sensibility, Huysmans admired the descriptive writing of Charles Dickens, but practiced a poetic novel, a form known in France as the prose poem. This genre, which typically emphasized sensation and an elaborate or exotic setting, was perfectly suited to his elegant style and rich vocabulary.

Huysmans was a prolific writer of novels, art criticism, essays, short stories, and prose poems. His most renowned work, Against the Grain or Against Nature (À rebours, 1884), celebrated the decadent movement in European art and literature, later to be embraced by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and others. In this novel, the protagonist, Duke Jean Floresas des Esseintes, embodies the aestheticism found in Wilde.

A wealthy aesthete living a life of pleasure in his country house, Des Esseintes is characterized by his addiction to exquisite sensations, exoticism, flowers, decoration, perfume, and art. Against the Grain ranks with Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and Moore's Confessions of a Young Man as important examples of the decadent movement.

Huysmans's other significant novel is Down There (Là-bas, 1891), which describes the world of the occult of the 1880s, a world of Satanism, demonology, magic rites, and black masses, both imagined and actual in Paris and Lyon of the day, a subject matter also appearing in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others. Another novel, Marthe (1876), explores the world of prostitution.

Since Huysmans was one of the first to describe or record the major impressionist painters, his Art Criticism (L'Art Moderne, 1883), particularly the section on "The Impressionist Salons of 1880, 1881, 1882," is valuable because it provides insights on such luminaries as Whistler, Degas, and Renoir. The artistic creed of impressionism, which stresses the importance of capturing the moment, is somewhat analogous to the emphasis on sensation in Huysmans's novels.

Huysmans maintained a correspondence with numerous writers of his day, including the homosexual symbolist poet Jean Lorrain and the novelist André Gide. Huysmans met Paul Verlaine in the summer of 1884, and in 1904, he edited and prefaced Verlaine's Religious Poetry.

Although Wilde was a more notorious figure than Huysmans, Huysmans influenced several of Wilde's artistic principles, especially those associated with "art for art's sake," "Art Nouveau," "decadence," and "impressionism."

Huysmans exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity. He was an inveterate collector of antiques and an art reviewer who praised the fine arts. He surrounded himself with male companions, the artistic and poetic circle of his day; and in his novels, he depicted an ornate, sumptuous world of beauty and sensation.

His fictitious characters resemble certain members of French society, a class of rich, aristocratic, decadent aesthetes, whom Wilde and Proust also later cultivated as central characters in their novels.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

Several artists and art critics of the nineteenth century achieved a self-aware homosexual identity that is expressed in both their lives and their works, but lesbianism is only rarely depicted in terms of identity during this period.

In the nineteenth century gay and lesbian sexuality becomes a significant subject in French literature.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

English decadent and Symbolist artist Aubrey Beardsley made a lasting contribution to the art of illustration; a satirist with a gift for caricature and grotesquerie, Beardsley attacked Victorian sexual values.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Almost as renowned for his homosexuality and depravity as for his literary achievements, Jean Lorrain was a French poet, novelist, and journalist of the "decadent movement" during the Belle Époque.

Count Robert de Montesquiou was a writer during France's Belle Epoque, but he is best remembered as a dandy and an aesthete, who inspired the literary creations of others.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.