He was born in 1866 in the Eyüp quarter of Istanbul, into a merchant family that had come from Uşak. His father, Halil Efendi, dealt in carpets; his mother was Behiye Hanım. After the neighbourhood school in Mercan he entered the military middle school at Fatih. When the war of 1877-78 shook the family trade they moved to İzmir in 1878; he finished school there, then learned French at the Mekhitarist school, and the French novel opened before him. In his twenties, while teaching French in İzmir and working at the İzmir branch of the Ottoman Bank, he began to write. In 1884 he founded the journal Nevruz with friends, and in 1886 the newspaper Hizmet with Tevfik Nevzat; his first novels were serialised there. In 1893 he moved to Istanbul and took a post in the tobacco administration that would keep him sixteen years. He found his own voice after joining the Servet-i Fünun circle in 1896. In Blue and Black he told of a young man who dreamt of becoming a poet and watched his hopes come apart; in Forbidden Love, of a passion tightening inside a mansion on the Bosphorus. Censorship silenced the journal in 1901 and the group scattered. After the constitutional revolution he taught at Darülfünun, and from 1909 to 1912 was chief secretary to Sultan Reşad. His later years passed in Yeşilköy, writing his memoirs; in 1937 the suicide of his son Vedat in Tirana broke him. With long, woven sentences and a heavy vocabulary he gave the Turkish novel a depth of inward observation it had not known, and built his plots to the measure of Western fiction. In his last years he simplified his own books for a new readership. He died in Yeşilköy on 27 March 1945.
Late Ottoman and early Republic era, late 19th-century intellectual, wearing a dark frock coat or suit with a waistcoat, formal posture, thick mustache, clean-shaven face style typical of the 1920s elite.