William Wymark Jacobs was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 author of short stories

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 and novels.
Jacobs is now remembered for his macabre tale "The Monkey's Paw

The Monkey's Paw

"The Monkey's Paw" is a horror short story by author W. W. Jacobs. It was published in England in 1902.The story is based on the famous "setup" in which three wishes are granted. In the story, the paw of a dead monkey is a talisman that grants its possessor three wishes, but the wishes come with an...

" (published 1902 in the collection of short stories The Lady of the Barge

The Lady of the Barge

The Lady of the Barge is an anthology of short stories by W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. Many of Jacobs' most famous short stories were included in this collection.-Details:...

) and "The Toll House" (published 1909 in the collection of short stories Sailors' Knots). However, the majority of his output was humorous in tone. His favourite subjects were marine life: "men who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage" said Punch

Punch (magazine)

Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...

, reviewing his first collection of stories, Many Cargoes, which achieved great popular success on its publication in 1896.

Many Cargoes was followed by the novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 The Skipper's Wooing in 1897, and another collection of short stories, Sea Urchins (1898) set the seal on his popularity.