Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884 - 1948) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, her imaginative and adventurous tales, characterized by ancient civilizations, remarkable artefacts, and fearsome supernatural beings, often blurred boundaries between fantasy, science fiction and the darker recesses of the ghost story. A pioneering female author of genre literature, her fantasy and science fiction writing was some of the first by an American woman to be widely published. Her novels Claimed! and The Citadel of Fear remain classic works of Weird Fiction.