United States

John Kendrick Bangs

1862–1922

Born in Yonkers, New York, Bangs was a humorist, editor, essayist and poet from the world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American popular literature, where wit, fantasy, satire and entertainment often overlapped. Much of his writing is deliberately playful: he approaches Halloween less as a night of terror than as an excuse to suspend ordinary seriousness and let the imagination take over. He died in 1922, leaving a large body of humorous and fantastical writing.