10 Favorite Horror Writers
Favorite literary writers of horror.
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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London, England. He later attended the University of Virginia for one year, but dropped out and ran up massive gambling debts after spending all of his tuition money. John Allan broke off Poe's engagement to his fiancée Sarah Royster. Poe was heartbroken, traumatized, and broke. He had no way out and enlisted in the army in May of 1827. At the same time Poe published his first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In 1829, he became a West Point cadet, but was dismissed after 6 months for disobedience. By that time he published "Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A. Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by his fellow cadets. His early poetry, though written in the manner of Lord Byron, already shows the musical effects of his verses.
Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old. He earned respect as a critic and writer. In his essays "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe formulated important literary theories. But his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism. He did produce, however, a constant flow of highly musical poems, of which "The Raven" (1845) and "The Bells" (1849) are the finest examples. Among his masterful short stories are "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death". Following his own theory of creating "a certain unique or single effect", Poe invented the genre of the detective story. His works: "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is probably the first detective story ever published.
Just when his life began to settle, Poe was devastated by the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. Two years later he returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his former fiancée, Sarah Royster, who, by that time, was a widow. But shortly after their happy reconciliation he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where Doctor John Moran diagnosed "lesions on the brain" (the Doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared. Poe's critic and personal enemy, named Rufus Griswold, published an insulting obituary; later he visited Poe's home and took away all of the writer's manuscripts (which he never returned), and published his "Memoir" of Poe, in which he forged a madman image of the writer.
The name of the woman in Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was used by Vladimir Nabokov in 'Lolita' as the name for Humbert's first love, Annabelle Leigh. Nabokov also used in 'Lolita' some phrases borrowed from the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was set to music by Claude Debussy as an opera. Sergei Rachmaninoff created a musical tribute to Poe by making his favorite poem "The Bells" into the eponymous Choral Symphony.- Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine and others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most famous novel is considered to be "At the Mountains of Madness", about an expedition to the South Pole, which discovers strange creatures beneath a mountain.
- Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He died when the Gogol was 15. Young Gogol was fond of the drama class at his high school in Nezhin, Ukraine. He was strongly influenced by his religious mother, as well as by the enchanting beauty of the Ukrainian folklore. He also called himself a "free Cossac".
At age 18 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg, became a student, and later a professor of history at the St. Petersburg University. His short stories, set in St. Petersburg, became a success. His play "Revizor" (1836, The Inspector General) had its premiere in St. Petersburg attended by the Tzar Nickolai I. But it also made him many powerful enemies who hated his satire on the corrupt Russian society. It was his friend Alexander Pushkin who suggested to him the subject for "Revizor". Pushkin also suggested the main idea of "The Dead Souls" (1842), a bitter satirical story of a crook, who was buying the names of dead surfs from various greedy landlords, for a tax-evasion scheme. In his other famous story "Shinel" (1842, The Overcoat) a poor clerk is intimidated both by thieves and by the government. Gogol's discontent against the slavery and social injustices in Russia caused him trouble. He escaped to Europe for 12 years, returning to Russia briefly to publish the 1st part of "The Dead Souls".
His religious beliefs were used by the State-controlled Orthodox Church to place guilt on him and to cause interruption of his literary work. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return to Russia, he settled in Moscow, where he fell under the control of the fanatical Orthodox priest, Konstantinovskii, who demanded that Gogol quit writing and destroy the manuscript of the 2nd part of "The Dead Souls". Torn by his inner conflict with guilt and being under the pressure from the fanatical priest, Gogol burned his manuscript. He died nine days later in pain without having any food during his last days. In the 1931 excavation of his tomb, his body was found lying face down, which caused suspicion that Gogol was buried alive.
His style involves the elements of the fantastic and grotesque, with the taste for the macabre and absurd, following the tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaimed, "We all came out from under his Overcoat", referring to Gogol's influence on Russian writers. Sometimes compared with Franz Kafka, Gogol had such followers, as Yevgeni Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail A. Bulgakov. - Rampo Edogawa was born on 21 October 1894 in Nabari-machi, Naga-gun, Mie Prefecture, Japan [now Nabari City, Mie Prefecture]. Rampo was a writer, known for Edogawa Rampo no bijo (1977), Shonen tanteidan: Teki wa genshisenkoutei (1959) and Shonen tanteidan: Kabutomushi no yoki (1957). Rampo died on 28 July 1965.
- Robert E. Howard created Conan the Barbarian in a series of short stories and novels in the 1930's. Born in Peaster, Texas, he was raised in Cross Plains. His fiction was carried in pulp magazines of the time such as Weird Tales, and H.P. Lovecraft was a friend and admirer of his. He committed suicide after holding vigil by his mother's deathbed in 1936.
- Ambrose Bierce was born on 24 June 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was a writer, known for The Damned Thing is of Such a Color! (2020), The Twilight Zone (1959) and 11 O'Clock: a Sense of Imminent Calamity (2023). He was married to Mary Ellen "Mollie" Day. He died in 1914 in Mexico.
- Clark Ashton Smith was born on 13 January 1893 in Long Valley, California, USA. He was a writer, known for Night Gallery (1969), Cineficción Radio (2019) and The Last Incantation (2019). He was married to Carolyn Jones Dorman. He died on 14 August 1961 in California, USA.
- Algernon Blackwood was born on 14 March 1869 in Shooter's Hill, Kent, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The Willows, Tales of Mystery (1961) and The Human Chord. He died on 10 December 1951 in Bishopsteighton, Kent, England, UK.
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Born in 1862, Montague Rhodes James developed a reading habit at an early age, preferring to stay in the library than with friends. He took this with him when he went to study at Eton and then at the King's College, Cambridge, where he became assistant in classical archaeology at the Fitzwilliam museum. After writing a dissertation: "The Apocalypse of St. Peter", he became a Fellow of King's, and then Dean. Although he was renowned in some circles for his biographies, studies into antiques, reviews and palaeography, it was his ghost stories that he would be remembered for. He was keenly engaged in examining the supernatural, and his stories were always written in a way so the reader uses their imagination. The real horror is often kept to the reader's mind. Celebrated cult horror novelist and story writer H.P. Lovecraft was a fan, and wrote a review on his work: "...gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life." he says, also adding: "Dr. James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers." Although largely ignored by filmmakers - Curse of the Demon (1957) - is one exception), his work has a dedicated fan base, and the BBC filmed several of his stories in the 1970s, wisely titling them under the series "A Ghost Story for Christmas". In 2000, horror legend Christopher Lee jumped at the chance to read four of James' stories in another Christmas special screened on BBC2. James' most famous works include "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary", "The Five Jars", "A Warning to the Curious and other Ghost Stories" and "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James".- At the age of 6, Lafcadio Hearn, who had been born in Leucos in the Greek Ionian Islands to a Greek mother and an Irish father, was made a ward of his Irish great-aunt, who packed him off to Jesuit boarding schools in France and Britain. At the age of 16, he was sent to the US, where he worked as a journalist in Cincinnati, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He translated French literature into English and began to develop his own taste, which was for the foreign, the exotic, and--sometimes--the macabre. Hearn's life changed radically when he traveled to Japan in 1890. He fell in love with the place and then with Setsu Koizumi, the daughter of a samurai family whose husband had deserted her and left her penniless. They were married in 1891. Hearn enthusiastically became a Japanese citizen, took the name Yakumo Koizumi, and acquired a teaching position at Imperial University, which he held until 1903. His interpretations of things Japanese--customs, geography, folk tales and literature--were internationally translated, widely admired, and adapted into films such as Kwaidan (1964); any of his works are still in print today. His loyalty and love for his adopted country was unflagging throughout his life. He died at the age of 54.