| W. F. Harvey | |
| Birth Name: | William Fryer Harvey |
| Birth Date: | 14 April 1885 |
| Birth Place: | Leeds, West Yorkshire, England |
| Death Place: | Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England |
| Occupation: | Short story writer |
| Nationality: | English |
William Fryer Harvey AM (14 April 1885 – 4 June 1937), known as W. F. Harvey, was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" (1910) and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces".[1] [2] [3]
Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).
His brother was Thomas Edmund Harvey, MP.
In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving.[4] He received lung damage during his award-winning rescue operation. The damage troubled him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good-natured memoir We Were Seven (1936).
Harvey was a practising Quaker.
Before the war he had shown interest in adult education, on the staff of the Working Men's College, Fircroft, Selly Oak, Birmingham. He returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement.
In 1928 he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England.
He moved to Letchworth in 1935 and died there in 1937 at the age of 52. After a funeral service at the local Friends Meeting House Harvey was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Old Letchworth.[5]
The release of the film The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed by Robert Florey and starring Peter Lorre, inspired by what was perhaps his most famous and praised short story, caused a resurgence of interest in Harvey's work. In 1951 a posthumous fourth collection of his stories, The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, appeared, including a set of twelve stories left in manuscript at the time of his death, headed "Twelve Strange Cases".
In 2009 Wordsworth Editions printed an omnibus volume of Harvey's stories, titled The Beast with Five Fingers, in its Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series . The volume contains 45 stories and an introduction by David Stuart Davies.