1885–1937
William Fryer Harvey began life without one of the burdens that afflict most writers. Thanks to a family inheritance, he did not have to earn a living. He attended excellent Quaker schools and then Oxford’s venerable Balliol College, and when health troubles forced him to take a break after receiving his medical degree at Leeds, Harvey could afford to recuperate with a voyage around the world. He spent some of this time resting in Australia, writing. The result was his first book, Midnight House and Other Tales, published in 1910 by J. M. Dent, the original publisher of the ambitious Everyman’s Library. The volume included the stylish and modern-feeling “August Heat.”
Harvey’s Quaker family and friends upheld a tradition of philanthropy, to which Harvey also committed himself. Early in his life he worked at the Working Men’s College at Fircroft, a pioneer institution promoting adult education. He joined the famed Friends’ Ambulance Unit, which operated under the auspices of the British Red Cross Society and was staffed largely by conscientious objectors trained at the Quaker center in Jordans, a village in Buckinghamshire associated with Quakerism since the sixteenth century. Later, serving in the Royal Navy as a surgeon during World War I, Harvey received a medal for his heroic shipboard rescue of an officer from a burning boiler room.
The fumes permanently scarred his lungs, however, leading to a lifetime of illness. Harvey died at the early age of fifty-two, a decade before the appearance of a movie version of his classic, fast-moving horror story “The Beast with Five Fingers.” He is remembered now for that story, for his subtle horror classic “The Clock,” and especially for the elegant, understated gem that follows.