He was a strong critic of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which led to the censorship of much of his work by the Ottoman government.

He later attended an Armenian Catholic school to learn French where he completed his first translation works.

He contributed to Mehâsin, a women's magazine which was started in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.

Uşaklıgil's early style is based closely on French Romanticism and most of his novels deal with unfulfilled love.

His work is distinguished from contemporary Turkish literature by its more concrete form and creates its own artistic language through the use of Persian and Arabic loanwords.