Yellow Danger

Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947) was the major literary talent of the group of authors represented in this collection. Until 1898, however, his impact on the world of letters had been largely confined to the fin-de-siécle literary movement personified by The Yellow Book and John Lane's Keynotes Series of short novels. The Lord of the Sea (1901) and The Dragon (1913). Shiel had contributed two of the more idiosyncratic titles to that series, Prince Zaleski (1895) and Shapes in the Fire (1896). He wrote for the monthlies of the day (his finest work, the science fiction disaster novel The Purple Cloud, was originally serialized in the Royal Magazine) and the cheap weeklies like Short Stories and Pearson's Weekly, but he also wrote serials for the London daily newspapers.