Edgar Saltus

Born in New York City in 1855, Edgar Saltus became a distinctive American man of letters whose writing ranged across fiction, biography, criticism, and philosophy. He studied at Yale and built a reputation for an urbane, highly literary style that set him apart from many of his contemporaries.

Saltus is especially remembered for works such as The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, as well as for biographies and novels that drew on his interest in brilliant, controversial, or extravagant figures. Readers have often linked him with the Decadent movement because of his love of refined language, irony, and subjects touched by doubt, beauty, and excess.

Though never as widely read as some major American novelists of his era, he has continued to attract readers who enjoy stylish prose and fin-de-siècle atmosphere. He died in 1921, leaving behind a body of work that still feels unusual, skeptical, and unmistakably his own.