Herman Teirlinck (1879-1967), the Flemish novelist and playwright, began his career by writing naturalistic regional novels but soon became a writer of aesthetically refined, fin-de-siecle prose about city life. In the 1920s and '30s he championed socially committed community art, expressionist and experimental drama, and plays for outside theaters and mass audiences.
With “Maria Speermalie” (1940) and “Het Gevecht met de Engel” (Fight with the Angel, 1952), Teirlinck returned to the regional novel. “The Man in the Mirror” (1956, translated in 1963) is a refined exercise in prose that is strongly autobiographical in character.