Herbert J. Mangham (1896-1967)-The Basket

Herbert J. Mangham, author of "The Basket," was actually Herbert Joseph Maughiman or Joseph Herbert Maughiman. He was born on April 27, 1896, in Des Moines, Iowa, and lived in Salina, Kansas, as a child. In the first decade of the twentieth century, his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. His mother died there of cancer on the last day of May, 1909. If childhood is, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, the kingdom where nobody dies, then Herbert Maughiman began his life in exile at age thirteen.

Maughiman studied journalism at the University of Missouri. On June 11, 1918, he entered service in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of sergeant and serving with the medical department at Camp Pike, Arkansas. Maughiman separated from the Army after exactly one year and one month of service, on July 11, 1919. By 1921, he was in San Francisco and working as a writer.

Maughiman got his start as a professional writer at age sixteen when he began selling jokes to Life and Ladies' Home Journal. He had a poem called "Brazen" in Snappy Stories on July 2, 1918. His first published story was "Everybody's Laughing Stock" in Argosy Allstory Weekly, December 17, 1921. He also had humorous items and poems in Life, Liberty, Judge, and The Saturday Evening Post. He had only one story in Weird Tales, "The Basket," from March 1923. His accomplishment earned Maughiman mention in a contemporary newspaper article about writers from Missouri. That's the first newspaper article I have found about the first issue of Weird Tales. Maughiman sometimes wrote under his own name and sometimes under the pen name Herbert J. Mangham. His credits listed in The FictionMags Index are scant. They include stories and poems in titles as low as Breezy Stories and Snappy Stories and as high as The Smart Set and The New Yorker. He seems to have been mostly a humorist, and in later years a journalist.

Maughiman lived, worked, and wrote in New Orleans and New York City. Later in life, he traveled and sent back to the United States feature articles on Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. He died in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on September 14, 1967, and was buried at the American Cemetery in that city. I have written about Herbert J. Maughiman before. Click here to read what I wrote.

Herbert J. Mangham's Story:

"The Basket" is a short story of just three and a half pages. It's set in a hotel in San Francisco. Its subject is a resident of the hotel, the quiet and mysterious Dave Scannon of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, but the main character is the woman who runs it, Mrs. Buhler. Much of Herbert Maughiman's early output was humorous. "The Basket" is not except perhaps in a black and bitter and ironic way. Maybe Maughiman was writing in the mode of Ambrose Bierce, also of San Francisco and also the author of very brief, bitter, and ironic tales.

You should read "The Basket." It's one of the best stories I have covered so far in this series. Along with "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson, it was included in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt (1997). In his introduction, the late Mr. Kaye called "The Basket," "a hauntingly understated vignette that reminds me of the bleak existential fiction of Albert Camus."

Jesse James' corpse basket, now at the Jesse James Home Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. The basket in Herbert J. Mangham's story is just such a basket, once used by coroners for the removal of bodies. Mangham, aka Maughiman, lived in Missouri during his teenaged years and early adulthood. Maybe he knew of the Jesse James basket. Even if he didn't, baskets such as this one must still have been in use in the 1920s, just another artifact of a culture and a society that have disappeared from the earth, swept away by the passage of time.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley