Arthur Schnitzler (May 15, 1862 - October 21, 1931) was an Austrian writer and doctor.

He was born in Vienna and began studying medicine at university in 1879 where he received his doctorate of medicine in 1885. He then worked in Vienna's General Hospital (Allgemeines Krankenhaus).

His works illuminated personal relationships so cuttingly (causing scandals more than once) that fellow Viennese Sigmund Freud confessed almost enviously that Schnitzler succeeded in intuitively finding solutions where he himself required long scientific research to achieve the same result. Despite his seriousness of purpose, Schnitzler frequently approaches the bedroom farce in his plays.

He meticulously kept a diary from the age of seventeen until two days before his death in Vienna. This manuscript of almost 8,000 pages has been edited in ten volumes between 1981 and 2000 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The British playwright Tom Stoppard adapted Schnitzler's play Leibelei as Dalliance, and Das weite Land as Undiscovered Country.

Selected works

• Reigen (1900), usually called La Ronde, is still frequently presented. Max Ophüls directed the first movie adaptation of the play in 1950, and Roger Vadim directed a second version in 1964.
• Anatol (1893)
• Anatols Größenwahn
• Das weite Land (1909)
• Der grüne Kakadu
• Professor Bernhardi (1912)
• Leutnant Gustl (1900)
• Liebelei (1895) (made into film by Max Ophüls)
• Traumnovelle (1925/26) (adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by American director Stanley Kubrick)