Marcel Schwob

Mayer André Marcel Schwob, known as Marcel Schwob (23 August 1867 – 26 February 1905), was a Jewish French symbolist writer best known for his short stories and his literary influence on authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño. He has been called a "surrealist precursor". In addition to over a hundred short stories, he wrote journalistic articles, essays, biographies, literary reviews and analysis, translations and plays. He was extremely well known and respected during his life and notably befriended a great numbers of intellectuals and artists of the time.

He was born in Chaville, Hauts-de-Seine on 23 August 1867 into a cultivated family. His father, George Schwob, was a friend of Théodore de Banville and Théophile Gautier,. His mother, Mathilde Cahun, came from a family of intellectuals from Alsace. He was the brother of Maurice Schwob and uncle of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob).

His family had just returned from Egypt, where his father had headed the cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ten years. When the French Third Republic began, the Schwob family lived in Tours, where George became the director of the newspaper Le Républicain d'Indre-et-Loire. In 1876, he moved to Nantes to direct the Republican daily Le Phare de la Loire; after he died in 1892, his eldest son Maurice, born in 1859, took his place.

At age 11 he discovered the work of Edgar Allan Poe translated by Charles Baudelaire. He then read the original versions of his tales in English and they proved to be a lifelong influence in his writing. In 1878-1879, he studied at the Lycée of Nantes where he won the 1st Prize for Excellence. In 1881, he was sent to Paris to live with his maternal uncle Leon Cahun, Chief Librarian of the Mazarine Library, and continue his studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he became friends with Léon Daudet and Paul Claudel. He developed a gift for languages and quickly became multilingual. In 1884, he discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, who was to become one of his friends and role models. He studied philology and Sanscrit under Ferdinand de Saussure at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1883-4. He then completed his military service in Vannes, joining the artillery.

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