Fitz-James O'Brien

Fitz-James O’Brien was born in County Cork, Ireland, in about 1828, the son of a lawyer. He came into an inheritance as a young man, spent it in London in a couple of years, and by 1852 had emigrated to New York. There he became a fixture of the city’s literary bohemia. He was a regular at Pfaff’s, a beer cellar on Broadway where writers including Walt Whitman gathered, and he wrote poems, plays, journalism and stories at speed for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. He had a reputation for charm, borrowing money and getting into fights.

When the Civil War began in 1861 he joined a New York regiment, and he later served on the staff of General Frederick Lander. In February 1862 he was shot in the shoulder during a skirmish in Virginia, and he died of complications from the wound on 6 April 1862. He was about thirty-three. His career had lasted barely a decade, and his stories were not collected until 1881.

O’Brien wrote a good deal of conventional fiction, but he is remembered for two stories that combine the Poe tradition with the new popular science of the 1850s. Both are on this site. The Diamond Lens (1858) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. It is the confession of a young man obsessed with microscopes who will do anything, including murder, to get a perfect lens, and who then falls in love with a tiny woman he sees in a drop of water. It caused a sensation and is often counted among the founding stories of American science fiction. What Was It? (1859), from Harper’s, is about boarders in a supposedly haunted New York house, one of whom is attacked one night by something he can feel and hold but cannot see. It is one of the earliest invisible-monster stories, predating Maupassant’s “The Horla” and Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” and you can read all three on this site.

Start with “What Was It?” It’s the shorter of the two and has a great scene with plaster of Paris.