H Hedayat, Sadegh Mehrdad Bidgoli University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Definition This entry looks at the life and work of the Iranian pioneering modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat in the hope of finding out how the city, culture, and folklore influenced him and how he influenced them in turn. Hedayat’ s life and work was pre- sumably not irrelevant to the city, and there is evidence to support that both himself and his writings are connected with different urban spaces – mainly Tehran, Isfahan, Paris – and cul- tures as well as with their political aspects. These connections are more salient in his realist and satirical works in which he takes critical perspec- tives on the city, mostly on its cultural, social, and political aspects. It turns out that Hedayat looked at culture, worldviews, beliefs, monuments, etc., with a skeptical and critical lens at the same time as he maintained his relation with them and was a part of them. Introduction Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951), the Iranian short story writer, novelist, and translator, was born in Tehran into an aristocratic family. In 1909, he began his elementary education at Elmiyeh School and later showed his abilities in composi- tion. Then he moved to Dar ul-Funun school, and around 1916 he was reportedly diagnosed with an eye infection halting his education for about a year. He later began (1919 [1298]) and finished (1925 [1304]) his high school at a prestigious French school located in Tehran (St. Louis school), where he also taught Persian to a French priest (Hedayat 2017: 22) and became acquainted with French language, world literature (mostly French), and metaphysics (see Katouzian 1993b: 28–30), all becoming, perhaps, the bases for his later modernist orientations and the creation of many of his opaque and mysterious atmospheres, settings, and characters. Soon after Reza Shah’ s ascending to the throne, Hedayat, along with a number of other Iranian students, was sent to study in Europe in 1926. This was the beginning of his direct expo- sure to different cities, peoples, and cultures. He stayed for some time in Belgium and then moved to France, where he also tried to commit suicide in a river in 1928, but was saved; he soon abandoned his studies in architecture and devoted himself to writing. In 1930, Hedayat returned to Tehran and began working in Bank-e-Melli which at the time was the central bank of Iran. It was around this time that he became a close friend of writers Bozorg Alavi, Masoud Farzad, and literary scholar Mojtaba Minovi. Hedayat had previously published an essay in French “Le Magie en Perse” (1926), a short essay © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Tambling (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_169-2