John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-born writer and screenwriter best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the '50s.

John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Wyndham Lewis, and Paul Theroux.

[citation needed] He appears to have given few interviews in his life; those include conversations with biographer Betty Richardson, Tom Milne, and Max Wilk.

From his first work to his version of Paradise Lost, Collier saw humans, flawed but with potential, everywhere contaminated by narrow creeds, institutions, coteries, vanities, and careers.

His father indulged him; over the course of the next ten years Collier lived on an allowance of two pounds a week plus whatever he could pick up by writing book reviews and acting as a cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper.

[2] During this time, being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes and visits to picture galleries.

[5] For ten years Collier attempted to reconcile intensely visual experience opened to him by the Sitwells and the modern painters with the more austere preoccupations of those classical authors who were fashionable in the 1920s.

[3] He felt that his poetry was unsuccessful, however; he was not able to make his two selves (whom he oddly described as the "archaic, uncouth, and even barbarous" Olsen and the "hysterically self-conscious dandy" Valentine) speak with one voice.

[2] Biographer Richardson explained the literary context for the book: His Monkey Wife is the last among light early-twentieth-century fantasies that include G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (1911), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928).

Collier's book, however, appeared immediately after the economic crash and the start of the Great Depression in 1929, when the tone of the literary and intellectual world darkened.

[1]As a private joke, Collier wrote a decidedly cool four-page review of His Monkey Wife, describing it as an attempt "to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel," and concluding with the following appraisal of the talents of its author: "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humor is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude.

"[7] Richardson calls it "part of a tradition of apocalyptic literature that began in the 1870s" including The War of the Worlds: "Usually, this literature shows an England destroyed by alien forces, but in Collier's novel, set in Hampshire in 1995, England has been destroyed by its own vices—greed, laziness, and an overwhelming bureaucracy crippled by its own committees and red tape.

"[1] His final novel, Defy the Foul Fiend; or, The Misadventures of a Heart, another title taken from the same speech in King Lear as Tom's A-Cold, was published in 1934.

[8] Similarly, Christopher Fowler wrote in The Independent, "His simple, sharp style brought his tales colourfully to life" and described Collier's fiction as "sardonic".

He contributed notably to the screenplays of The African Queen along with James Agee and John Huston, The War Lord, I Am a Camera (adapted from The Berlin Stories and remade later as Cabaret), Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy.

Several of his stories, including "Back for Christmas", "Wet Saturday" and "De Mortuis", were adapted for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.