William Hope Hodgson Biography

British writer, born in Essex. His experience serving at sea during 1891–9 provided the material and imagery for most of his books, including the two novels The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) and The Ghost Pirates (1909) and most of the stories collected in Men of the Deep Waters (1914) and The Luck of the Strong (1916). He is remembered for his two major supernatural novels: The House on the Borderland (1908), which conflates traditional horror story material with an apocalyptic vision of the future; and The Night Land (1912), a futuristic fantasy set in a dying Earth whose only human inhabitants huddle together in great steel ‘redoubts’, and who encounter fantastic creatures as they await humanity's demise. Hodgson served throughout the First World War and died at Ypres.