comte de Arthur Gobineau

Born in France in 1816, Arthur de Gobineau served as a diplomat and spent years posted abroad, including in Persia, Greece, and Brazil. Those experiences fed his curiosity about languages, cultures, religion, and history, and they show up strongly in his fiction and essays.

He wrote novels, short stories, and historical works, and many readers still know him for Nouvelles asiatiques and other travel-colored writing. He also produced the four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, a work whose racial ideas later drew lasting attention and criticism.

Gobineau died in 1882. Today he is studied both as a literary figure with a wide international outlook and as a controversial thinker whose writings on race had a troubling afterlife far beyond his own era.