The Austrian novelist, dramatist, and essayist Robert Edler von Musil (1880-1942) gained a largely posthumous fame for his monumental and unfinished novel "The Man without Qualities."

Robert Musil was born on Nov. 6, 1880, in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, Austria. The son of a professor of engineering, Musil received his elementary education at military schools from 1892 to 1897. After serving for a period as an officer in the Austrian army, he began engineering studies, later changing to philosophy, logic, and experimental psychology. In 1908 he obtained a doctorate for his work on Ernst Mach from the University of Berlin. Between 1911 and 1914 Musil served as librarian at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. During this time he also was briefly an editor of Die neue Rundschau, a review. During World War I Musil was an officer in the Austrian army, and in the postwar period he was employed in the War Office and in various other...