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PART 1 1901–1939, The Golden Age Literary periods rarely begin or end as neatly as decades and centuries do. “Attempts to impose neat periodization on literary history almost always par- ticipate in a teleological, distorting model of history.” 1 Accurate models of literary history don’t have well-defi ned borders and, instead, overlap each other considerably. An author commonly thought of as being of one century and one period and movement often lives into and is productive in the fol- lowing century, after the period ends and the movement dies out. So, too, with literary movements and fashions in genres. And so too with the horror genre. The year 1900 did not signal the begin- ning of a new movement in the genre. Rather, the turn of the twentieth cen- tury fell roughly in the middle of what most scholars describe as the genre’s “golden age,” 2 that period of forty to fi fty years—the exact borders of the “golden age” of horror differ depending on who is doing the defi ning—that saw a remarkable outpouring of high-quality horror fi ction. But the turn of the twentieth century was especially important in British horror letters, because it was during the fourteen years from 1894 to 1907 that the four writers most responsible for changing the course of British horror—Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Lord Dunsany—created a signifi cant discontinuity with what had come before. The break with tradition among the Americans took place much later, beginning in 1923, with the appearance of the pulp magazine Weird Tales . By 1939, the horror fi eld was essentially unrecognizable compared to where it had been at the start of the century.