Hugh B. Cave
Hugh B. Cave was an influential English-American writer born on July 11, 1910, in Chester, England. He emigrated with his family to Boston during World War I, where he began his writing career at a young age, winning recognition for his short stories. Cave's prolific output included approximately eight hundred stories across various magazines, establishing him as a prominent figure in pulp fiction, particularly in the horror, mystery, and adventure genres. During World War II, he served as a reporter, which enriched his storytelling with authentic depictions of far-off lands and cultures.
Cave's fascination with Voodoo and his experiences living in Haiti and Jamaica significantly influenced his later works. After a long hiatus from horror fiction, he made a notable comeback in his later years, receiving multiple awards for his contributions to the genre, including the Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. He continued to write until his passing on June 27, 2004, in Florida, leaving behind a legacy that includes a substantial body of work and a biography published shortly after his death. Cave's life and career reflect a dynamic engagement with both literary and cultural themes, making him a unique figure in American literature.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Hugh B. Cave
Writer
- Born: July 11, 1910
- Birthplace: Chester, Cheshire, England
- Died: June 27, 2004
- Place of death: Vero Beach, Florida
Biography
Hugh Barnett Cave was born in Chester, England, on July 11, 1910. He was named after the writer Hugh Walpole, a favorite author of his mother. His parents had met in South Africa where his mother was a Boer war nurse and his father an army paymaster. Following the outbreak of World War I, the family emigrated to Boston when Cave was five. He attended Brookline High School. When only he was fifteen when he won an honorable mention in a short-story contest sponsored by the Boston Globe. He attended Boston University on a scholarship, but had to leave when his father was severely injured in an accident.
He began working for a vanity press, where he began writing his own stories and poems and sold his first story, “Island Ordeal,” in 1929, at age nineteen. From then onwards his stories began appearing in magazines such as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine and Spicy Mystery Stories (where in each story the heroine inadvertently lost her clothes). Aged twenty, he was able to give up his job and during the next decade, he estimated that he wrote somewhere in the region of eight hundred stories for about one hundred magazines.
During World War II, Cave travelled widely around the Pacific and Southeast Asia as a reporter. This led to several successful nonfiction books and also reinvigorated his fiction. Cave had written hundreds of stories set in far-off lands but had hitherto never visited them. Now he was able to write authoritatively set south-sea adventures and to sell them to the ’slick’ magazines such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and The Saturday Post, which paid far better than pulps. He left the horror field for almost three decades.
He married Margaret P. Long in 1935. In the late 1970’s, they became estranged but were never actually divorced. Peggie Thompson became his companion in 1980 and died in 2001. He was the father of one son, Geoff.
In the early 1950’s, Cave moved to Haiti where he became fascinated by Voodoo, and then to Jamaica where he took over a derelict coffee plantation that he turned into a great success. After fifteen years of living in Jamaica and Florida, his plantation was reclaimed by the Jamaican government and he returned to the United States full time.
He returned to genre fiction after Karl Edward Wagner published a volume of his best horror tales, Murgunstrumm, and Others, in 1997. This volume won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Further horror and crime collections of his pulp fiction followed. Then in his sixties, a rejuvenated Cave produced a stream of fiction, mostly in the horror genre and frequently using a Haitian Voodoo motif.
He received the Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association in 1991, the Living Legend Award from International Horror Guild in 1995 and the World Fantasy Convention in 1999. He was a special guest of honor at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention in 1997. He continued to write and publish stories and novels up until his death on June 27, 2004, at a hospice in Vero Beach, Florida at the age of 93. He had diabetes. A biography, Cave Of A Thousand Tales by Milt Thomas, was published by Arkham house the week after his death.