W. W. Jacobs was one of the most popular humorists of the early 1900s, although his most famous story, "The Monkey's Paw," is considered a horror classic. William Wymark Jacobs, born September 8, 1863, was the son of a wharf manager and his wife. He grew up in Wapping, a seaport section of London. The docks and wharves of seaport towns later provided the setting for many of his stories.

Jacobs attended private schools and entered the civil service as a clerk in 1879, a job that he hated. When he was about twenty years old, he began writing stories and articles for fun, and by 1885 he began to publish them in magazines. His first collection of stories, Many Cargoes, was published in 1896, and the following year, he published two novellas in a single volume—The Skipper's Wooing/The Brown Man's Servant. However, Jacobs was a cautious man, and...