Blackwood, Algernon

The British author Algernon Henry Blackwood grew up in a strictly religious home in Kent. He soon abandoned his Christian faith for Buddhism, thereby laying the foundation for a life-long interest in Eastern mysticism, the occult and Theosophy. He spent a year between 1885 and 1886 with the Moravian Brethren in Germany, and after a failed business attempt he became a dairy farmer in Canada in 1890. Two years later he travelled to New York where he worked as a reporter for the New York Sun, translator and model. Unlike the fantasy stories that made up most of his production, the short story Max Henzig (1907) was based on a feature article he had written about a poisoner.