Authors

French · 1870–1925

Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and novelist associated with the Symbolists whose Chansons de Bilitis (1894) — prose poems presented as translations from an ancient Greek poetess, a mystification that deceived classicists — and erotic novel Aphrodite (1896) made him famous. A close friend of Mallarmé, Gide, Valéry, and Debussy, he was at the centre of the fin-de-siècle literary world before his health and eyesight declined, leaving him in reclusion for the last twenty years of his life.