William Hope Hodgson was born in 1877, in the county of Essex, Great Britain. The son of a clergyman, at the age of thirteen he enlisted in the merchant marine, so he had the opportunity to travel around the world. After eight years he returned to England, where he worked as a photographer and gym teacher at a Blackburn school. He also began writing in 1905 by publishing his first story A Tropical Horror. Two years later he saw his first novel The boats of the “Glen Carrig” published, where he recounted the experience of some castaways in the Sargasso Sea.

But his first major work was The House at the End of the Earth (1908), which was followed by The Phantom Pirates (1909) and The Kingdom of the Night (1912), his longest novel.

Considered one of the forerunners of modern science fiction and horror literature, Hodgson inspired great authors of the genre such as H. P. Lovecraft.

In World War I he enlisted in the British Army and fought in France until the day of his death at the age of forty, on April 17, 1918, due to the wounds produced by a German grenade.