Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin

Vincent Starrett (1886-1974), was a Canadian-born American writer, journalist, and bibliophile.

A great connoisseur and admirer of British literature, Starrett was a major enthusiast of Welsh writer and mystic Arthur Machen and was instrumental in bringing Machen's work to an American audience for the first time.

Arthur Machen, best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction, was above all a great mystic and initiate, and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. His later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation.

In 1918 Starrett wrote and published in Chicago the essay Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin, which we today repropose to our readers. The essay includes two uncollected poems by Arthur Machen.