Zombies: A Compendium by Otto Penzler

Author:Otto Penzler [Penzler, Otto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780857890276
Publisher: Corvus
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ALTHOUGH HE DESCRIBED himself as American and referred to America as home, F.(rancis) Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was born in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, and was mainly educated at Cambridge University (England), the University of Heidelberg (Germany), and the University of Rome (Italy). He spent two years in India, studying Sanskrit. In 1881, he moved to Italy, where he lived permanently, though he spent many winters in New York.

His books were very successful from the beginning, though a rather sumptuous lifestyle and enormous generosity forced him to work at a ferocious pace, producing about five thousand words a day and two or more novels a year almost until the day he died. He was primarily a romanticist and was often accused of writing too quickly and too prolifically to allow the full expression of his talent. His villains were absolutely black, his heroes were unrealistically virtuous, and his women characters of unsurpassed perfection, which, a cousin of his noted, was the way he saw people in the real world.

His vivid, picturesque novels, for all the impressive sales and popularity during his lifetime, have not stood the test of time and few modern readers are likely to know, much less be tempted to dip into, what are regarded as his finest works: Saracinesca (1887), Sant’ Ilario (1888), or Don Orsino (1891). The same is not true of “The Upper Berth,” his most famous and frequently anthologized tale, which H. P. Lovecraft described as “one of the most tremendous horror stories in all literature” in his critical history, Supernatural Horror in Literature.

“The Upper Berth” was first collected in a very rare book, The Broken Shaft (New York: Putnam, 1886), and then, because of its reputation as a small masterpiece, it was published in the collection The Upper Berth (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894).

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