Francis Stevens (real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett) was the first major female writer of fantasy and science fiction in the United States. Bennett wrote a number of highly acclaimed fantasies between 1917 and 1923 and has been called "the woman who invented dark fantasy." Among her most famous books are Claimed (which H. P. Lovecraft called "one of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read") and the lost world novel The Citadel of Fear. Bennett also wrote an early dystopian novel, The Heads of Cerberus (1919).