Montague Rhodes James was an English medievalist scholar and author who served as provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918), and of Eton College (1918–1936) as well as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge (1913–1915). James's scholarly work is still highly regarded, but he is best remembered for his ghost stories, which are considered by many critics and authors as the finest in the English language and widely influential on modern horror.

James originally read the stories to friends and select students at Eton and Cambridge as Christmas Eve entertainments, and received wider attention when they were published in the collections Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925), and the hardback omnibus The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). James published a further three stories before his death in 1936, and seven previously unpublished or unfinished stories appeared in The Fenstanton Witch and Others: M. R. James in Ghosts and Scholars (1999), all of which have been included in later collections.

James redefined the ghost story for the new century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors, and is noted for his use of realism and dry humour to ground the stories and contrast with the supernatural elements. He is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story" and "the Father of Folk Horror" for the way his plots and characters drew on his own scholarly interests in ancient folklore and the rural landscapes of East Anglia. This association has continued into the 21st century due to the many adaptations of his stories, which have made him, according to critic Jon Dear, "the go-to folk horror writer".