Francis Clement Kelley

Francis Clement Kelley combined Catholic ministry with a literary career spanning novels, short fiction, and speculative religious writing. Born in Canada, he became a priest, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction connects that vocation to the imaginative concerns found across his work. The City and the World and Other Stories, published in 1913, gathers narratives concerned with moral choice, faith, social responsibility, and unusual premises. The encyclopedia singles out “The Flaming Cross” and “The Autobiography of a Dollar,” examples that show the collection moving among markedly different situations and voices. A separate Gutenberg record verifies Kelley’s authorship and the volume’s complete title. His clerical experience provides relevant background, but the stories are not reducible to instruction: their varied characters allow questions of conduct and consequence to emerge through narrative. Kelley thus occupied a distinctive early twentieth-century intersection of pastoral service, institutional activity, and popular storytelling for a general readership.