This Austrian novelist combined irony and utopia in his writings as a way of analyzing and stating the spiritual crisis of his time. Born to a family of the lesser nobility, he studied Engineering, Logic and Experimental Psychology at Berlin University.

While writing his first novel, Young Törless(1906) he taught engineering but then gave up in eagerness to follow up the success of his novel. In 1911 he published two short novels with the name Unions, that focused on sexual relationships.

Musil fought in the First World War as part of the Imperial Army, and worked for a short time as a civil servant in the new Republic of Austria before deciding to focus completely on literature. In 1938, during the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Musil decided to leave the country and settled in Switzerland.

His main task at that time involved writing his titanic and unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities(1930-1943), in which he provides a detailed description of Austrian society before 1914, a scene from which his antihero Ulrich comes into being. This is probably one of the most ambitious narrative writings of the 20th Century.