The Cream of the Jest

Felix Kennaston is known around the town of Lichfield as a dreamer, a strange man with literary ambitions and little to show for them. While finishing a story, he discovers a strange talisman. Later that night, a dream inspires him to change his novel's ending, guaranteeing its unlikely success. The Cream of the Jest is a novel by James Branch Cabell.

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell's worked appeared in both Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.