Arthur Machen's long career was diverse in both interest and achievement. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s as an aesthete, he later became a master of the horror tale, moved on to create almost single-handedly what might be called the tale of spiritual awakening, wrote three volumes of autobiography often judged classics of the genre, and as journalist and essayist fought passionately against the prevalent materialistic values of the age in which he lived. His best-known short story, "The Bowmen"(1915), was set in World War I and became a cause célèbre, as many people believed that the supernatural events he had invented were a record of what had truly taken place. Yet his earnings from literature were meager. He inspired intense enthusiasms in a variety of discerning minorities, many of them younger writers, but achieved real popularity only briefly, in the 1920s in the...