Abraham Merritt (2/5) The Woman Of The Wood

THE WOMAN OF THE WOOD.....
Here is a story utterly different from any you have ever read before—a tale of a forest of trees in actual warfare against their human foes—utterly weird, utterly fascinating, utterly thrilling. It is a tale of vivid beauty and eery thrills.
For four centuries a family of French peasants had lived on the edge of this forest in the Vosges Mountains; and now, when the last of the race attacked the trees with fire and ax, the forest struck back. This is a story of graphic action, strange murders and uncanny mystery — and through it shines the incredible beauty of the Woman of the Wood.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.....
Abraham Grace Merritt (January 20, 1884 – August 21, 1943) was an American editor and author of works of fantastic fiction. Born in Beverly, New Jersey, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1894. Originally trained in law, he turned to journalism, first as a correspondent and later as editor. He was assistant editor of The American Weekly from 1912 to 1937 under Morrill Goddard, then its editor from 1937 until his death. As editor, he hired the unheralded new artists Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok and promoted the work done on polio by Sister Elizabeth Kenny.

His fiction was only a sideline to his journalism career, which might explain his relatively low output. One of the best-paid journalists of his era, Merritt made $25,000 per year by 1919, and at the end of his life was earning $100,000 yearly exceptional sums for the period. His financial success allowed him to pursue world travel he invested in real estate in Jamaica and Ecuador and exotic hobbies, like cultivating orchids and plants linked to witchcraft, magic (monkshood, wolfbane, blue datura, peyote, and cannabis). Merritt married twice, once in the 1910s to Eleanore Ratcliffe, with whom he raised an adopted daughter, and again in the 1930s to Eleanor H. Johnson. He maintained an estate in Hollis Park Gardens on Long Island, where he accumulated collections of weapons, carvings, and primitive masks from his travels, as well as a library of occult literature that reportedly exceeded five thousand volumes. He died suddenly of a heart attack, at his winter home in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, in 1943.

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