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During a sixty-one-year career Algernon Blackwood wrote more stories and novels featuring psychic, mystical, and supernatural phenomena than any other contemporary. Many of his short stories are of high quality and particularly excel at evoking atmosphere, leading H. P. Lovecraft in 1927 to refer to Blackwood's work as "some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age." Scholar E. F. Bleiler confirms Blackwood's position as "the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century." However, Blackwood has also been pigeonholed as a ghost-story writer and thus underrated, though he deals with a vast array of psychological and spiritual states in stories ranging from the psychologically realistic to those portraying nature as alive and potentially threatening to ones evoking mystical union with the divine. The variety of his fiction is matched only by the eclecticism of his sources and by the variety of his experiences. His adventuresome spirit appears to be in part a response to his upbringing, repressive even by late-Victorian standards and referred to by Blackwood in Episodes Before Thirty (1923) as both "sheltered to the point of ignorance" and "strange."
Algernon Henry Blackwood was born on 14 March 1869, the fourth of five children, in Shooter's Hill, Kent, to Stevenson Arthur "Beauty" Blackwood and Harriet Sydney Dobbs, both descended from aristocratic families.
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