Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life. The term masochism is derived from his name. During his lifetime, Sacher-Masoch was well known as a man of letters, a utopian thinker who espoused socialist and humanist ideals in his fiction and non-fiction. Most of his works remain untranslated into English. The novel Venus in Furs is his only book commonly available in English.