John kendrick bangs biography

Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.

(1862-1922) US editor, playwright, poet and author, extremely prolific under several names from about 1880, though he increasingly used his own; most of his books are primarily of interest as humorous fantasies, though some are sf or sf-like.

His editorial career with Harper's New Monthly Magazine (and its offshoots) lasted from 1888 to 1901, during which period he was involved in publishing work by Arthur Conan Doyle (whose work he parodied: see below), Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and others.

He is now best remembered for the first volume of his Styx sequence, A House-Boat on the Styx: Being Some Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades (1896), which provides a model for many stories featuring the famous dead as posthumous or Immortal protagonists in Planetary Romance venues, where endless exemplary adventures are experienced along rivers without apparent end, fantasticating and softening the end-stopp