author

Adrien Le Corbeau

1886–1932

Best known under a pen name, this Romanian-born writer built a literary life in Paris and left behind a small, unusual body of work, including the novel later translated by T. E. Lawrence as The Forest Giant.

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The Forest Giant

The Forest Giant

by Adrien Le Corbeau

About the author

Born in 1886 and dead in 1932, Adrien Le Corbeau was one of the pseudonyms used by Rudolf Bernhardt, a Romanian-born author who spent most of his adult life in Paris. His surviving record is slim, but library and reference sources confirm that he published in French and that his work circulated under both names.

His best-known book is Le Gigantesque (1922), which appeared in English as The Forest Giant in a 1923 translation by T. E. Lawrence. The novel never became widely famous, but it has remained a point of interest because of that translation and because it shows Bernhardt aiming for large, ambitious themes.

Records from the Bibliothèque nationale de France also list other works, including Quelques feuillets sur Émile Zola (1920), L'heure finale (1924), and Le couple nu (1931). A contemporary study of Lawrence's translation also notes that Le Corbeau received a Montyon prize from the Académie française for Le Gigantesque, suggesting that, even if he is little read today, he did attract serious notice in his time.