Fitz James O'Brien

Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–1862) was an important early American writer of the fantastic. ‘The Diamond Lens’ imagines a scientist glimpsing a tiny woman in a drop of water through a perfect microscope; ‘What Was It?’ is a classic tale of an invisible monster. Bridging Poe and later science fiction, his short, inventive career was cut short when he died of wounds in the American Civil War.