S P A C E L I G H T
INDEX
Name: CAVE, Hugh Barnett
Aged: 93
Born: July 11, 1910
Where: Chester, Cheshire, England
Died:June 27, 2004
Where: Vero Beach, Florida
Interred: _ _ _
Married: Margaret P. Long
When: 1935 (d 2003, not divorced)
Companion: Peggy Thompson
Died: 2001
Awards: World Fantasy Awards: 1978 for Best Collection, Murgunstrumm and Others; 1997 Special Convention Award; & 1999 Life Achievement; 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement; 1997 International Horror Guild Living Legend Award
Hugh B. Cave
"Many of today's writers seem to think obscurity is a virtue and have apparently decided that a reader who can't understand them will think them artistic . . . The great writers of the past would not be remembered today had they fallen into this subtle trap."
When he died, Hugh B. Cave had about 20 books in print, out of about 45 written...not bad for a pulp writer. At the age of 81, he was presented with the Horror Writers of America Life Achievement Award. "They only gave it to me because everyone else is dead." At that time he was just warming up.
Cave's first professional short stories were sold in 1929 to Brief Stories (which had a similar tenure), "Island Ordeal" and "The Pool of Death," appearing in the July and August issues respectively. At the end of his life, there were copious stories in every pulp field...mystery, horror, fantasy, western, adventure, detective, jungle...everything but science fiction. When the pulps died at the end of WWII, with only a handful hanging on afterwards, Hugh turned his attention to the slicks. Again, he was majorly successful with continuous sales to Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, Boy's Life, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Redbook, Elk's, etc magazines. His pulp work numbered in the 800 story area and slick sales were in the 350 story/article area. He then began writing novels. And his longevity allowed him to gather together material for multiple collections, the first among them, Murgunstrumm and Others, winning the World Fantasy Award in 1977.
During WWII, Hugh was a war correspondent. He wrote five non-fiction works about the heroism he encountered: The Fightin' est Ship: The Story of the Cruiser Helena, Dodd Mead (1944), Long Were the Nights: The Saga of a PT Squadron in the Solomons, Dodd Mead (1944), We Build, We Fight, the story of the Seabees, Harper (1945), Wings Across the World, the story of the Air Transport Command, Dodd Mead (1945), & I took the Sky Road, the story of pilot Norman M. Miller, Dodd Mead (1946).
Hugh was fascinated with Haiti and Jamaica, escaping there after WWII, and wrote many books and articles about them...some say his non-fiction Haiti: Highroad to Adventure is the definitive work about that country. He became an expert on voodoo and most of his novels involve that black art. His style was not like Hemingway's but his simplistic approach to telling a story was. He was literate and proud of it. I suspect Hugh Cave will be far more famous in the next two decades than he has been, once the movie people undergo another of their famous rectal extractions.
But all that aside, and above all else, nobody could write a horror story better than Hugh B. Cave...you'll have to learn that for yourself....some damp, chilly, stormy evening when you're all alone...
PEN NAMES: Allen Beck, Carey Barnett, Justin Case, Carl Hughes, & John Starr.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.
BIOGRAPHY: Pulp Man's Odyssey: The Hugh B. Cave Story, by Audrey Parente, Starmont 1988, & Cave of a Thousand Tales, by Milt Thomas, Arkham House 2004
OBITUARY: The Independent and others.
