William Chambers Morrow

Background

William Morrow was born July 7, 1854, in Selma, Alabama, United States.

Education

William Morrow graduated from Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham at the age of fifteen.

Career

After the American Civil War, William Morrow ran the hotel in Mobile, a family business, in 1876. Then, in 1879 he moved west to California and started to write stories to The Argonaut that concentrated on violence and mayhem rather than the fantastic and the horrific. Morrow also was a contributor to periodicals, including San Francisco Examiner, Californian, and Overland Monthly. His short stories were revised and republished in his 1897 collection The Ape, the Idiot, and Other People. Some of them were borderline science fiction, but others were straightforward horror stories, including the revenge stories His Unconquerable Enemy, about the implacable revenge of a servant whose limbs have been amputated on the orders of a cruel rajah, The Inmate of the Dungeon, and An Original Revenge. Others, such as The Resurrection of Little Wang Tai and Over an Absinthe Bottle, are closer in spirit to the ironic Grand Guignol contes of Maurice Level.

Two Singular Men is a tale of carnival freaks, unapologetically relayed in the worst possible taste, while The Faithful Amulet is a gleefully violent black comedy of remarkable coincidences. Perhaps the most famous of the stories in the collection is The Monster-Maker. The story tells about an elderly physician-surgeon who is approached by a young man wanting to commit suicide. The doctor agrees to help him in exchange for the sum of $5,000. Several years passed, and, finally, after several complaints, the local police raided the doctor's residence. They find a gorilline creature of unbelievable strength, with a silver globe where its head ought to be. Additionally, Morrow founded a school for writers in 1899, and in 1901 he produced a pamphlet, The Art of Writing for Publication.

Achievements

• William Morrow was noted mainly for his short stories of horror and suspense. He is probably best known for the much-anthologized story, His Unconquerable Enemy. Moreover, Morrow was the founder of a school for writers in 1899.

Works

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  • Blood-Money 1882
  • The Ape, the Idiot and Other People 1897
  • A Man: His Mark 1900
  • Bohemian Paris of To-Day 1900
  • Lentala of The South Seas 1908

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Morrow was one of the West Coast Bohemians, who were as close as America ever came to a Decadent Movement. He was, in fact, the man who emphasized their cultural and ideological links with the French Decadent writers." - Brian Stableford

Connections

William Morrow had a wife, Lydia Houghton. They married in 1881 and had a child, which, according to different sources, was stillborn or died in infancy.

Wife:

Lydia E. Houghton