Extraordinarily prolific in a number of literary genres and author of translations, sketches, essays, memoirs, poems, plays, novels, tales, and short fiction that in his lifetime appealed to both popular and educated taste on both sides of the Atlantic, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany, was also a world traveler and a man of wide-ranging interests and experiences. His earliest unpublished stories were composed while he was still a schoolboy. His last stories were published three years before his death at the age of seventy-nine.

Dunsany's fantastic inventions of time and place have been compared with those of American novelist James Branch Cabell, his gothic landscapes with those of Dublin-born Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Like Cabell, Dunsany created not just characters but entire nations, even worlds. Like Le Fanu, he imbued the familiar and commonplace with a mysterious presence. Characteristics that distinguish Dunsany are intricately contrived...