ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOHN YONGE AKERMAN (1806–1873) was an English antiquarian specializing mainly in numismatics. He also wrote fiction under the pseudonym Paul Pindar.
JACK BRANT was a pulp writer who appeared in such magazines as All-Story. Little is known about his life.
MYLA JO CLOSSER (1880-1962) remains an unjustly obscure writer, best known these days for being the sister of actress, author, and playwright Louise Closser Hale.
ARTHUR WILLIS COLTON (1868-1943) obtained his Ph.D. in literature from Yale and was a popular magazine writer, known for his romanticism, humor, and sarcasm. His notable works include “Tioba” (1903), “The Belted Seas” (1906), and “The Cruise of the Violetta” (1906).
BITHIA MARY CROKER (née Sheppard, 1849–1920) was a prolific Anglo-Indian novelist. Very little is known about her life. She was the only daughter of Rev. William Sheppard, Rector of Kilgefin Church in County Roscommon, Ireland. She married Lieutenant Colonel John Stokes Croker (1844-1911 CE), an officer in the Royal Munster Fusiliers in 1871. Soon after their marriage she followed her husband to Madras where he worked, then went to Bengal. She lived in India for fourteen years, and spent some time in a hill station in Wellington. There she wrote many of her works. After her husband’s retirement in 1892, the couple went to live in County Wicklow, and finally settled in Folkstone. She had one daughter who was educated at Rockferry, Cheshire. She was immensely interested in reading, travelling, and theatre.
Her literary career spans 37 years, from 1882 when she was 33 years old, until 1919. She wrote nearly 46 works of which some are short story collections dealing with variety of themes. In the stories and also in the novels she occasionally employs a Gothic element for which she seems to have had a special infatuation. Most of her works were set in India and other parts of the Empire, including Africa and Egypt. They usually deal with Indian military life. Most of her novels reveal the troubles and tribulations of unswerving and dedicated lovers who are destined to unite after a considerable delay. Her works have been compared to those of her Victorian contemporaries like Thomas Hardy.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s most well-known fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented popularity, and by the twentieth century he was widely seen as a literary genius by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859–1930) was a British writer and physician, most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularizing the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.
OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR (1873-1953) was an American author most remembered for her body of supernatural fiction. Her work also appears in The Second Ghost Story Megapack.
AMELIA B. EDWARDS (1831–1892) was an English novelist, journalist, traveller and Egyptologist. Born in London to an Irish mother and a father who had been a British Army officer before becoming a banker, Edwards was educated at home by her mother, showing considerable promise as a writer at a young age. She published her first poem at the age of 7, her first story at age 12. Edwards thereafter proceeded to publish a variety of poetry, stories and articles in a large number of magazines including Chamber’s Journal, Household Words and All the Year Round. She also wrote for the Saturday Review and the Morning Post.
ELLEN GLASGOW (1873–1945) was an American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary south.
LILLIAN B. HUNT published a small number of supernatural stories in the early part of the 20th century. Little is known about her.
JEROME K. JEROME (1859–1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. His supernatural work tends to be humorous in nature.
SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849–1909) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine. Jewett is recognized as an important practitioner of American literary regionalism.
RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) was a British writer born in India, and heavily influenced by his experiences there. He’s best-known today for such soldiers’ stories as “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), and for his children’s tales, especially The Jungle Book (1894), Just So Stories (1902), and Kim (1901). He was the first English-language author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907).
WALTER E MARCONETTE is primarily remembered these days for his fanzine editing. As editor of Scienti-Snaps in the 1930s and 1940s, he published a mix of fiction, columcs, and articles by fans and professionals.
H. B. MARRYATT is better known as Frederick Marryatt, famous for his novel The Phantom Ship.
BRANDER MATTHEWS (1852–1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study in the academic world. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own day.
FIONA MACLEOD was the pseudonym of WILLIAM SHARP (1855–1905), a Scottish writer, of poetry and literary biography. In 1893 he began also publishing as Macleod, a pseudonym kept almost secret during his lifetime.
MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (1850–1922) was an American fiction writer of novels and short stories who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. She is considered by many to be Appalachia’s first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of Appalachian literature, although a number of characters in her work reinforce negative stereotypes about the region. She has been favorably compared to Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett, creating post-Civil War American local-color literature.
FRANK H. SPEARMAN (1859–1937) was an American author best known for his books in the Western fiction genre and especially for his fiction and non-fiction works on the topic of railroads.
EDMUND GILL SWAIN (1861–1938) was an English cleric and author. As a chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, he was a colleague and contemporary of the scholar and author M. R. James, and a regular member of the select group to whom James delivered his famous annual Christmas Eve reading of a ghost story composed specially for the occasion. Swain collaborated with James on topical skits for amateur performance in Cambridge, but he is best known for the collection of ghost stories he published in 1912, entitled The Stoneground Ghost Tales.
JULIET WILBOR TOMPKINS was a popular author at the turn of the 20th Century, known for romances such as A Girl Named Mary and Pleasures and Palaces.
HENRY VAN DYKE (1852–1933) was an American author, educator, and clergyman. Among his popular writings are the two Christmas stories, The Other Wise Man (1896) and The First Christmas Tree (1897). Various religious themes of his work are also expressed in his poetry, hymns and the essays collected in Little Rivers (1895) and Fisherman’s Luck (1899). He wrote the lyrics to the popular hymn, “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” (1907), sung to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
ok with friends
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 60