Arthur Machen (originally Arthur Llewellyn Jones) Biography

British short-story writer, born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, educated at Hereford Cathedral School. He was the only son of a Welsh Anglican clergyman. His early immersion in Welsh myth and legend disposed him toward the esoteric; following his move to London in 1880 he worked as a cataloguer of arcane and cabbalistic literature and joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W. B. Yeats was the best-known member. The stories of The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888) marked the start of his career as a prolific author of grotesquely imaginative supernatural and mystical fiction. The better known of his subsequent works include The Great God Pan (1894), The Three Impostors (1895; stories), The House of Souls (1906; stories), and The Hill of Dreams (1907). A later tale, The Angel of Mons (1915), created an apocryphal legend of the First World War. Other works include translations of The Heptameron (1886) and The Memoirs of Casanova (1893); Hieroglyphics (1902, criticism); and two volumes of autobiography, Far Off Things (1922) and Near and Far (1923).