He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.Īt the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. As a penetrating portrayal of the accursed artist, redolent with soulful longing and genteel decay, it ranks as a landmark work in English literature.Īrthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. Lyrical and introspective, The Hill of Dreams established Machen as one of the great prose masters of the language. With its suggestive visions of decadent sexuality, the work scandalized Victorian London. In The Great God Pan, Arthur Machen delivers a tense atmospheric story about a string of mysterious suicides. Further, Machen's name often crops up in the writings of theorists and practitioners of psychogeography, a school of thought and literature which explores the hidden links between the landscape and the mind. Machen is also a key figure in the development of pulp magazine fiction (e.g, Weird Tales), a line of ancestry that leads directly to today's popular graphic novels. Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as Paul Bowles and Jorge Luis Borges are just a few of the literary notables who are counted among his admirers. Waite), his writing transcends the genre of supernatural horror. While displaying a preoccupation with pagan themes and matters of the occult (an interest he shared with his close friend, the distinguished scholar A. LovecraftĪrthur Machen (1863-1947), Welsh novelist and essayist, is considered one of the most important and influential writers of his time.

'Of creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few can hope to equal Arthur Machen.'-H.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen