In his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945) Howard Phillips Lovecraft called Fitz-James O'Brien one of Edgar Allan Poe's earliest disciples, and from the time of Poe's death to the turn of the century, O'Brien was the foremost American writer of supernatural and sciencefiction short stories. Though he established his literary reputation as a poet and essayist, O'Brien's handful of collected short stories established him as a master of the macabre.

Michael Fitz-James O'Brien was born in Cork, Ireland, between April and 31 December 1828. His father, James O'Brien, Esquire, was a country coroner. His mother, Eliza O'Driscoll O'Brien, described as a beautiful woman, was some twenty years younger than her husband, and not long after his death in 1839 or 1840 she married DeCourcy O'Grady, a man of wealth and distinguished ancestry. Though Fitz-James survived the first of the great Irish famines in 1845, which resulted in large-scale immigration of Irish peasants to America...