author
Adrien Le Corbeau
1886–1932
Best known for the strange, little-remembered novel The Forest Giant, this early-20th-century writer published in French under the name Adrien Le Corbeau. His work has stayed alive largely through its unusual English translation by T. E. Lawrence.
1 Audiobook
The Forest Giant
by Adrien Le Corbeau
About the author
Adrien Le Corbeau (1886–1932) was a pen name used by the Romanian-born author Rudolf Bernhardt. The name now surfaces most often in connection with The Forest Giant (Le Gigantesque), a French novel from the 1920s that later appeared in English in a translation by T. E. Lawrence, writing as J. H. Ross.
Library and catalog records show that Le Corbeau published more than just that one book. Surviving listings include Quelques feuillets sur Émile Zola from 1920 and Le couple nu: roman nuptial from 1931, suggesting a writer active in French literary circles across more than a decade.
Much about his life remains hard to verify quickly from widely available sources, and even today he is a fairly obscure figure. What makes him memorable is the curious afterlife of his work: a mostly forgotten author whose fiction remains of interest because of its rarity, its symbolism, and its link to one of the 20th century's most famous translators.