F. Marion Crawford

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) was an American novelist who spent most of his life in Italy. The son of the sculptor Thomas Crawford, he was born at Bagni di Lucca and educated in the United States, England, Germany and Italy, and he studied Sanskrit before editing a newspaper in India. His first novel, Mr. Isaacs (1882), was an immediate success, and he went on to write more than forty, many set in Italy, such as the Saracinesca series about the Roman aristocracy, together with Paul Patoff, Stradella and admired ghost stories like "The Upper Berth." He lived for many years in a villa at Sorrento.