Machen, Arthur

Abstract

Welsh writer Arthur Machen shot to prominence in the 1890s through the pagan‐themed gothic tales – including The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Imposters (1895) – that helped to lay the foundation of the weird fiction genre. He was also a journalist, literary critic, biographer, and mythographer whose nongothic fiction, for example his magisterial Künstlerroman The Hill of Dreams (1907), drew inspiration from Celtic Christianity, anthropology, occultism, British folklore, and the Welsh countryside. Machen's career was rejuvenated during World War I through his famous Angels of Mons story, “The Bowmen” (1914), and retained its mythopoeic direction through his repeated literary revisitations of the Grail legend.