Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh mystic and author of the 1890s and early 20th century best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1894) is considered a classic of horror with Stephen King claiming it to be "maybe the best ... in the English language, " and his WWI short story The Bowmen, widely read as fact, created the legend of The Angels of Mons. He first gained a literary reputation for his stories published in literary magazines from 1890, his gothic and fantastic themes fitting into the growing aesthetic movement of the time. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde in 1895 he encountered difficulty in finding publishers for his works of decadent horror. The Hill of Dreams was written between 1895-97 but was not published until 1907. A semi-autobiograqphical novel, it recounts the story of Lucian Taylor, focusing first on his dreamy childhood in rural Wales and the old Roman fort (the Hill of Dreams) where he has strange sensual visions, some set in the time of Roman Britain. Lucian later moves to London in the hope of earning a living as an author, enduring poverty and suffering in pursuit of his art, and the novel is recognised as one of the first explorations in fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, in this case one who is very much part of the decadent 1890s. The 1920s saw a revival of Machen's literary fortunes with the publication of his final masterpiece The Secret Glory (1922), his autobiography Far Off Things, and new editions of his English translation of Casanova's Memoirs, but by 1926 the boom in republications was almost over and his income dropped. His financial difficulties were finally ended by a literary appeal in recognition of his stature as a distinguished man of letters which was launched in 1943 to mark his 80th birthday, backed by names such as T S Eliot, George Bernard Shaw and John Masefield.