Paul Auguste Marie Adam (7 December 1862 – 1 January 1920) was a French novelist who became an early proponent of Symbolism in France, and one of the founders of the Symbolist review Le Symboliste. He was a prominent writer in Montmartre's anarchist movement.
Adam's first novel, Chair molle ("Soft Flesh"), was the story of a prostitute in the Naturalist manner, which led to him being prosecuted for immorality before the Cour d'assises and sentenced to a fortnight in prison and a 500-franc fine. Together with Jean Moréas, he co-wrote Les Demoiselles Goubert, a novel that marked the transition to Symbolism in French literature. His Lettres de Malaisie (1897) was speculative fiction about politics in the future. He also wrote a series of historical novels that dealt with the period of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath; the first installment in the series, La Force, was published in 1899. It was followed by L'enfant d'Austerlitz (1901), La ruse (1902) and Au soleil de Juillet (1903). His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1912 Summer Olympics.
He was born and died in Paris.
"ADAM Paul", Le Maitron (in French), Paris: Maitron/Editions de l'Atelier, 2020-03-10, retrieved 2023-03-18
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Adam, Paul" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Works by Paul Adam at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Paul Adam at the Internet Archive
Works by Paul Adam at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Works by Paul Adam at HathiTrust
Signac, 1863-1935, a fully digitized exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, which contains material on Paul Adam (see index)