Elsa Barker, American author and poet, was born in 1869 in Leicester, Vermont, USA. Throughout her life, Barker’s poems and short stories were published in various books and magazines.
Her debut novel, The Son of Mary Bethel, was published in 1909 and this was followed in 1910 by her first collection of poetry, The Frozen Grail and Other Poems. Barker was a spiritual writer and one evening in 1912, while she was in Paris, she began automatic writing, the phenomenon where someone other than her own subconscious was writing using her hand. What followed was the trilogy of Living Dead Man books.
