All Musil's works including The Man without Qualities had strongly autobiographical elements. He wanted not to invent other worlds but to describe, criticise and so renew, the one around him. So he drew directly from life, preferring to rely on personal experience. When he reached beyond the frame of his own experience he proceeded cautiously, with careful consideration of all the evidence he could assemble, making unusual efforts to feel his way into the mind and senses of his subject.

Given that Musil's subject matter was derived from his own life it may seem surprising that he published so few creative works before The Man without Qualities, the first volume of which appeared when he was fifty years of age. Disposition and circumstance were responsible for this. He worked slowly, meticulously, self-critically: he tried to achieve both accurate representation of actual experience and stylistic perfection. He took time to learn his craft. He was no Hofmannsthal; he did not burst onto the Austrian literary scene as a precocious seventeen-year-old. Indeed, the earliest literary efforts are of interest only for their sense of isolation and neurotic self-preoccupation.