Francis Marion Crawford (August 2, 1854 – April 9, 1909)[1] was an American writer noted for his many novels, especially those set in Italy, and for his classic weird and fantastical stories.

His mother had hoped he could train in Boston for a career as an operatic baritone based on his private renditions of Schubert lieder.

In January 1882, George Henschel, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, assessed his prospects and determined Crawford would "never be able to sing in perfect tune".

His uncle Sam Ward suggested he try writing about his years in India and helped him develop contacts with New York publishers.

[6] In December 1882, he produced his first novel, Mr Isaacs, a sketch of modern Anglo-Indian life mingled with a touch of Oriental mystery.

He wrote three long historical studies of Italy and was well advanced with a history of Rome in the Middle Ages when he died.

However his 1896 novel Adam Johnstone's Son was thought by the late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing to be "rubbish".

In these, his intimate knowledge of local Italian history combines with the romanticist's imaginative faculty to excellent effect.

[4] In The Novel: What It Is (1893), he defended his literary approach, self-conceived as a combination of romanticism and realism, defining the art form in terms of its marketplace and audience.

A fourth book in the series, Corleone (1897), was the first major treatment of the Mafia in literature, and used the now-familiar but then-original device of a priest unable to testify to a crime because of the Seal of the Confessional; the novel is not one of his major works, having failed to live up to the standard set by the books earlier in the series.

A Cigarette-Maker's Romance (1890) was dramatized, and had considerable popularity on the stage as well as in its novel form; and in 1902 an original play from his pen, Francesca da Rimini, was produced in Paris by his friend Sarah Bernhardt.

Several of his short stories, such as "The Upper Berth" (1886; written in 1885), "For the Blood Is the Life" (1905, a vampiress tale), "The Dead Smile" (1899), and "The Screaming Skull" (1908), are often-anthologized classics of the horror genre.

The collected weird stories were posthumously published in 1911 as Wandering Ghosts in the U.S. and as Uncanny Tales in the UK, both without the long-forgotten "The King's Messenger" (1907).

Around 1914 the subscription firm McKinlay, Stone, Mackenzie was authorized to publish an edition using the Macmillan binding decorations.

[11][12][1] It was the result of a severe lung injury ten years previous, caused by inhalation of toxic gases at a glass-smelting works in Colorado, which happened during his American lecture tour in the winter of 1897–1898.

He was gathering technical information for his historical novel Marietta (1901), that describes glass-making in late medieval Venice.

Cento Anni Dopo 2009-1909 / A Hundred Years Later: New Light on Francis Marion Crawford early in 2011, edited by Gordon Poole.

In 2020, the writer Andrea Carlo Cappi with Matteo Fazzolari and Cosimo Gentile, created the literary prize for short story "Torre Crawford", whose annual theme is taken from a short story by Francis Marion Crawford (the theme of the first edition was "For the blood is the life ").