Algernon Blackwood facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Algernon Blackwood
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| Born | Algernon Henry Blackwood 14 March 1869 Shooter's Hill, Kent, England |
| Died | 10 December 1951 (aged 82) London |
| Occupation | Writer, broadcaster |
| Genre | Fantasy, horror, weird fiction |
| Notable works | The Centaur, "The Willows", "The Wendigo" |
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 – 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".
Life and work
Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill (now part of southeast London, then part of northwest Kent). Between 1871 and 1880, he lived at Crayford Manor House, Crayford and he was educated at Wellington College. His father, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, was a Post Office administrator; his mother, Harriet Dobbs, was the widow of the 6th Duke of Manchester. According to Peter Penzoldt, his father, "though not devoid of genuine good-heartedness, had appallingly narrow religious ideas." After Algernon read the work of a Hindu sage left behind at his parents' house, he developed an interest in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies. Blackwood had a varied career, working as a dairy farmer in Canada, where he also operated a hotel for six months, as a newspaper reporter in New York City, bartender, model, journalist for The New York Times, private secretary, businessman, and violin teacher. During his time in Canada, he also became one of the founding members of Toronto Theosophical Society in February 1891.
Throughout his adult life, he was an occasional essayist for periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and later telling them on radio and television. He also wrote 14 novels, several children's books and a number of plays, most of which were produced, but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, as many of his stories reflect. To satisfy his interest in the supernatural, he joined The Ghost Club. He never married; according to his friends he was a loner, but also cheerful company.
Jack Sullivan stated that "Blackwood's life parallels his work more neatly than perhaps that of any other ghost story writer. Like his lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists, he was a combination of mystic and outdoorsman; when he wasn't steeping himself in occultism, including Rosicrucianism, or Buddhism he was likely to be skiing or mountain climbing." Blackwood was a member of one of the factions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as was his contemporary Arthur Machen. Cabalistic themes influence his novel The Human Chord.
His two best-known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". He would also often write stories for newspapers at short notice, with the result that he was unsure exactly how many short stories he had written and there is no sure total. Though Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Good examples are the novels The Centaur, which reaches a climax with a traveller's sight of a herd of the mythical creatures; and Julius LeVallon and its sequel The Bright Messenger, which deal with reincarnation and the possibility of a new, mystical evolution of human consciousness. In correspondence with Peter Penzoldt, Blackwood wrote,
My fundamental interest, I suppose, is signs and proofs of other powers that lie hidden in us all; the extension, in other words, of human faculty. So many of my stories, therefore, deal with extension of consciousness; speculative and imaginative treatment of possibilities outside our normal range of consciousness.... Also, all that happens in our universe is natural; under Law; but an extension of our so limited normal consciousness can reveal new, extra-ordinary powers etc., and the word "supernatural" seems the best word for treating these in fiction. I believe it possible for our consciousness to change and grow, and that with this change we may become aware of a new universe. A "change" in consciousness, in its type, I mean, is something more than a mere extension of what we already possess and know.
Autobiography
Blackwood wrote an autobiography of his early years, Episodes Before Thirty (1923), and there is a biography, Starlight Man, by Mike Ashley (ISBN: 0-7867-0928-6).
Death
Blackwood died after several strokes. Officially his death on 10 December 1951 was from cerebral thrombosis, with arteriosclerosis as a contributing factor. He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium. A few weeks later his nephew took his ashes to Saanenmöser Pass in the Swiss Alps, and scattered them in the mountains that he had loved for more than forty years.
Legacy
- H. P. Lovecraft included Blackwood as one of the "Modern Masters" in the section of that name in "Supernatural Horror in Literature".
- Authors who have been influenced by Blackwood's work include William Hope Hodgson, George Allan England, H. Russell Wakefield, "L. Adams Beck" (Elizabeth Louisa Moresby), Margery Lawrence, Evangeline Walton, Ramsey Campbell and Graham Joyce.
- In the first draft of his essay "Notes on the Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings", J. R. R. Tolkien stated that he derived the phrase "crack of doom" from an unnamed story by Algernon Blackwood. In her book, Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle Earth Beyond the Middle Ages, Holly Ordway states that this unnamed Blackwood work is a novel titled "The Education of Uncle Paul".
- Frank Belknap Long's 1928 story "The Space-Eaters" alludes to Blackwood's fiction.
- Clark Ashton Smith's story "Genius Loci" (1933) was inspired by Blackwood's story "The Transfer".
- The plot of Caitlin R. Kiernan's novel Threshold (2001) is influenced by Blackwood's work. Kiernan has cited Blackwood as an important influence on her writing.
- In The Books in My Life, Henry Miller chose Blackwood's The Bright Messenger as "the most extraordinary novel on psychoanalysis, one that dwarfs the subject."
- Algernon Blackwood appears as a character in the novel The Curse of the Wendigo by Rick Yancey.
- In the PS4 game Until Dawn, the main setting is named Blackwood Pines, as the main antagonist is a Wendigo.
Critical studies
- An early essay on Blackwood's work was "Algernon Blackwood: An Appreciation," by Grace Isabel Colbron (1869–1943), which appeared in The Bookman in February 1915.
- Peter Penzoldt devotes the final chapter of The Supernatural in Fiction (1952) to an analysis of Blackwood's work and dedicates the book "with deep admiration and gratitude, to Algernon Blackwood, the greatest of them all".
- A critical analysis of Blackwood's work appears in Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story From Le Fanu to Blackwood, 1978.
- David Punter has an essay on Blackwood.
- There is a critical essay on Blackwood's work in S. T. Joshi's The Weird Tale (1990).
- Edward Wagenknecht analyses Blackwood's work in his book Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction.
- David Grimbleby, "Algernon Blackwood: A Personal Appreciation". Occulture 1, No 2 [1994]
- Eugene Thacker, in his "Horror of Philosophy" series of books, discusses Blackwood's stories "The Willows" and "The Man Whom The Trees Loved" as examples of how supernatural horror poses philosophical questions regarding the relation between human beings and the "cosmic indifference" of the world.
- Christopher Matthew Scott analyzes Blackwood's use of Christian symbolism and story setting as connected to the author's biography; describing a spiritual progression up from hellish city, through garden, forest, and mountain.
- Punter, David (2010). "Pity: Reflections on Algernon Blackwood's Gothic." English Language Notes 1 March 2010; 48 (1): 129–138.
- Brian R. Hauser discusses Blackwood's John Silence in the context of figures made popular by 1990s cinematic narratives, grouping him with Ichabod Crane and Fox Mulder, and classifying him as an early example of the supernatural detective whose investigation of a traumatized space mirrors a psychoanalyst's investigation of a traumatized psyche.
- Henry Bartholomew includes the "dark ecology" of Blackwood's "Pan's Garden" in his discussion of speculative realism and the gothic.
See also
- List of horror fiction authors
- Religion and mythology
- Tales of Mystery, a 1960s British supernatural television drama series
- Weird Fiction
