William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English writer, the son of an Essex clergyman, who ran away to sea at thirteen and spent eight years in the merchant marine, which he hated and which gave him the material for much of his fiction. Ashore, he opened a school of physical culture in Blackburn. His novels The Boats of the Glen Carrig, The House on the Borderland, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land, published between 1907 and 1912, combine sea horror with cosmic vision on a scale that later influenced Lovecraft. He was commissioned in the Royal Artillery and killed by a shell at Ypres in April 1918.