Bøker av James de Mille

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder us a satiric and fantastic romance is set in an imaginary semi-tropical land in Antarctica inhabited by prehistoric monsters and a cult of death-worshipers called the Kosekin. Begun many years before it was published, it is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and anticipates the exotic locale and fantasy-adventure elements of works of the "e;Lost World genre"e; such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, as well as innumerable prehistoric world movies based loosely on these and other works.

Although not one of De Mille's best works it does show his unerring assessment of the tastes of the American and Canadian reading public in the 1870s. With echoes of Wilkie Collins, Jules Verne, and other popular novelists of the period, this is a sensational melodrama full of impossible adventures, and of  'angelic heroines and villains of the deepest dye.'

James De Mille (1833-1880) was a professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and an early Canadian writer who published numerous works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s. He attended Horton Academy in Wolfville and spent one year at Acadia University. He then travelled with his brother to Europe, spending half a year in England, France and Italy. On his return to North America, he attended Brown University, from which he obtained a Master of Arts degree in 1854. He married Anne Pryor, daughter of the president of Acadia University, John Pryor, and was there appointed professor of classics. He served there until 1865 when he accepted a new appointment at Dalhousie as professor of English and rhetoric. His most popular work with contemporaries, and the work for which he is known today, is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which was serialized posthumously in Harper's Weekly in 1888. Other works included: Helena's Household (1867), Cord and Creese (1869), The Lady of the Ice (1870) and The American Baron (1872).