John Kendrick Bangs

John Kendrick Bangs was an American humorist, editor, and prolific author of comic fantasy, born in Yonkers, New York. As an editor for Harper's magazines from 1888 to 1901, he worked with contributors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain before launching his own satirical projects. He is best known for the Associated Shades sequence beginning with A House-Boat on the Styx (1896), which imagines famous historical and literary figures reunited as ghosts aboard a houseboat in the afterlife, and for the Mr. Munchausen and Idiot books, which extended his taste for absurdist club-room storytelling and comic invention. His children's Jimmieboy stories and the Mollie and the Unwiseman series applied the same playful fantasy to younger readers, and he also wrote well-known parodies of Sherlock Holmes. Extraordinarily prolific and often working under pen names, he helped shape a strain of American fantasy built on wit rather than wonder.