The Life and Works of
Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler is best known today for his 1926 novella Traumnovelle, the basis for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut — yet this comprehensive biography reveals a legacy far more expansive. A pioneering modernist, Schnitzler transformed the literary form through narrative invention and an unflinching examination of sex, power, and identity, producing a body of work whose influence endures to this day.

Schnitzler was a Viennese physician-turned-writer whose works were burned by the Nazis as "Jewish filth" in 1933, yet his legacy endures as one of modernism's essential voices. This biography reveals the man behind the scandals: his tempestuous affair with actress Adele Sandrock, his complex marriage to singer Olga Gussmann, his relationship with writer Clara Katharina Pollaczek, and the devastating 1928 suicide of his daughter Lili — a loss that haunted him until his own death in 1931.

He employed stream-of-consciousness twenty-two years before James Joyce, with his revolutionary 1900 novella Leutnant Gustl. His 1924 masterpiece Fräulein Else explores sexual coercion and consent with startling relevance to the #MeToo era. His banned play Professor Bernhardi (1912) exposes institutional antisemitism with prophetic clarity. His scandalous Reigen sparked riots in 1920 Berlin and remained banned for decades. This is the definitive account of one of Europe's most important and most misunderstood writers.

Arthur C. Rauscher is the editor and translator of the Ovid Publishing Group's Schnitzler Collection, including new annotated English editions of Dream Story, The Round Dance, Fräulein Else, Lieutenant Gustl, The Road Into The Open, and The Plays Vol. 1. This biography draws on his extensive research into Schnitzler's life, works, and historical context to produce the most comprehensive English-language account of the writer to date.