About the Author

Francis Marion Crawford (1854 - 1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels, especially those set in Italy and for his classic weird and fantastic stories. H. Russell Wakefield, in an essay on ghost stories, called Crawford's "The Upper Berth" "the very best one" of such stories. Norman Douglas credits Crawford's financial success as instrumental in encouraging himself to write (though he remained critical of Crawford's habit of inserting first-person editorial comments into his fiction).