Background
Léon Bloy was born on July 11, 1846, in Perigueux, France; the son of Jean-Baptiste Bloy and Anne-Marie Carreau.
(First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describ...)
First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describes the atrocities of war in 30 tales of horror and inhumanity from the pen of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," Léon Bloy.
https://www.amazon.com/Sweating-Blood-L%C3%A9on-Bloy/dp/1939663172/?tag=2022091-20
1893
(Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host...)
Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Léon Bloy.
https://www.amazon.com/Disagreeable-Tales-L%C3%A9on-Bloy/dp/1939663105/?tag=2022091-20
1894
(Lingering on the frontiers of Decadence, Naturalism, and ...)
Lingering on the frontiers of Decadence, Naturalism, and Symbolism, these stories of the damned and the foolish, of terrible fates and ludicrous situations, helped map out the terrain of the conte cruel and are, probably, the author’s most noteworthy work. In this, an authoritative translation of the volume originally published as Histories désobligeantes, Brian Stableford, in both his insightful introduction and his superb rendering of the tales, shines a much-needed light on Bloy’s savage genius.
https://www.amazon.com/Tarantulas-Parlor-Other-Unkind-Tales/dp/1943813159/?tag=2022091-20
Léon Bloy was born on July 11, 1846, in Perigueux, France; the son of Jean-Baptiste Bloy and Anne-Marie Carreau.
During the Franco-Prussian War, Bloy served as a volunteer. He later worked as a journalist for such prominent publications as Figaro and Gil Bias, where he readily proved himself an offensive and intractable writer who respected representation rather than reality. In the mid-1880s, however, he became even more asocial, abstaining from significant interaction with others and retreating to the relatively banal life of the Paris suburbs.
(Lingering on the frontiers of Decadence, Naturalism, and ...)
(First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describ...)
1893(Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host...)
1894(The Pilgrim of the Absolute is a collection of Léon Bloy’...)
1914As a youth Bloy cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching. In the late 1860s, Bloy fell under the influence of Catholic extremist Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly, and in 1870, Bloy converted to the Catholic faith.
Bloy’s writings are characterized by an idiosyncratic religious bent, summarized by Coombes as a “singularly uncharitable Christian polemic,” which Bloy often casts as Catholicism.
Quotations: "Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."
Bloy was an especially disturbing and inscrutable literary figure.
Quotes from others about the person
"Bloy’s personal life throughout these years, spent in the drab landscape of the Paris suburbs, seems to have been unutterably unattractive, friendless, and joyless.” - John E. Coombes
Bloy married Jeanne Molbech, in 1890. They had four children, two of whom perished from malnutrition.