Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about…
Masefield was born in Ledbury, a rural area in England to George Masefield, a solicitor and Caroline. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was only 6 and he went to live with his …
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories.
Caustic wit and a strong sense of horror mark works, including In the Midst of Life (1891-1892) and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), of American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce.
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found …
Faith Martin is a pen name of English author Jacquie Walton, who is best known for her popular detective series, starring Detective Inspector Hillary Greene.
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre i…
Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversia…
Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a decl…
Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The…
Clark Ashton Smith was a poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. It is for these stories, and his literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft from 1922 un…
Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards (1831-1892) was an English novelist, journalist, lady traveller and Egyptologist, born to an Irish mother and a father who had been a British Army officer before becoming …
Henry Kuttner was, alone and in collaboration with his wife, the great science fiction and fantasy writer C.L. Moore, one of the four or five most important writers of the 1940s, the writer whose work…
Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher of Jewish descent. He was regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century.
Violet Paget, known by her pen name Vernon Lee, is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes…
Fergusson Wright Hume (1859–1932), New Zealand lawyer and prolific author particularly renowned for his debut novel, the international best-seller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886).
Denis George Mackail was born in Kensington, London to the writer John William Mackail and Margaret Burne-Jones, daughter of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. Educated at St Paul's School, Hammersmith, …
Anatole le Braz, the "Bard of Brittany" (1859–1926) was a Breton folklore collector, translator and author. Le Braz was born in Saint-Servais (Côtes-d'Armor, Brittany in France) and raised amongst wood…
Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's appre…
Montague Rhodes James, who used the publication name M.R. James, was a noted English mediaeval scholar & provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–18) & of Eton College (1918–36). He's best remembere…
Henry Ferris Arnold is another "lost" author from the days of the pulps, something that is quite surprising since "The Night Wire" was considered the most popular story ever published in Weird Tales. …
James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successf…
Herbert Russell Wakefield was an English short story writer, novelist, publisher, and civil servant. Wakefield is best known for his ghost stories, but he produced work outside the field. He was great…
