Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, best known now for the Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career. Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories. His 1906 short story "The Bus-Conductor", a fatal-crash premonition tale about a person haunted by a hearse driver, has been adapted several times, notably in 1944 (in the film Dead of Night and as an anecdote in Bennett Cerf's Ghost Stories anthology published the same year) and in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Benson's works in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature", most notably of his story The Man Who Went Too Far.