Saltus, Edgar [Evertson]
Saltus, Edgar [Evertson]( 1855–1921),born in New York City, after studying at Yale and abroad and receiving an LL.B. from Columbia began his literary career with a biography of Balzac (1884); volumes of translations from French fiction; The Philosophy of Disenchantment (1885), popularizing the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann; and The Anatomy of Negation (1886), a history of antitheistic philosophies. This philosophic attitude and the resulting lack of faith in anything but an esoteric hedonism, devoid of social or moral considerations, was elaborated in his fiction dealing with New York society. Mr. Incoul's Misadventure (1887) was the first of a long series of novels whose melodramatic plots were clothed in an epigrammatic style, a lush use of bizarre language, and an extravagant adaptation of fin de siècle romanticism, as expressed in his dictum: “In fiction as in history it is the shudder that...
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