Author. Best remembered for his classic horror story The Monkey's Paw. His early life was spent at Wapping, where his father was the manager of the South Devon Wharf. It was here that Jacobs fostered an understanding of sea life and developed a familiarity with the characters that would later go on to populate much of his fiction. He would later begin writing as an escape from the drudgery of work life. Although he spent the years 1886 to 1894 practicing his art and submitting many stories to local publications, he went largely unnoticed. In 1896 his fortunes changed with the publication of Many Cargoes, a collection of short stories, which became an immediate success. He followed this with The Skipper's Wooing in 1897 and Sea Urchins in 1898. During his lifetime, he was known as a writer of humorous stories and seafaring tales, but to modern audiences he is most famous for The Monkey's Paw, a macabre tale which first appeared in the collection The Lady of the Barge in 1902, and which has since been reworked and anthologized in countless books and films. He continued to work into the 1930s, producing over a dozen collections, several novels, and seventeen plays before his death, one week short of his 80th birthday, in 1943.
Author. Best remembered for his classic horror story The Monkey's Paw. His early life was spent at Wapping, where his father was the manager of the South Devon Wharf. It was here that Jacobs fostered an understanding of sea life and developed a familiarity with the characters that would later go on to populate much of his fiction. He would later begin writing as an escape from the drudgery of work life. Although he spent the years 1886 to 1894 practicing his art and submitting many stories to local publications, he went largely unnoticed. In 1896 his fortunes changed with the publication of Many Cargoes, a collection of short stories, which became an immediate success. He followed this with The Skipper's Wooing in 1897 and Sea Urchins in 1898. During his lifetime, he was known as a writer of humorous stories and seafaring tales, but to modern audiences he is most famous for The Monkey's Paw, a macabre tale which first appeared in the collection The Lady of the Barge in 1902, and which has since been reworked and anthologized in countless books and films. He continued to work into the 1930s, producing over a dozen collections, several novels, and seventeen plays before his death, one week short of his 80th birthday, in 1943.
Bio by: Sean McKim
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