Dail, C C
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1851-1902) US lawyer, poet and author whose Willmoth sequence, beginning with Willmoth the Wanderer, Or The Man from Saturn (1890; rev vt Willmoth the Wanderer 1891), is a genuine oddity. Though told with no great skill, its narrative, purporting to be that of Willmoth the Saturnian as told towards the end of his several-million-year lifespan, is an eventful affair. Willmoth proceeds from Saturn to Venus (via Antigravity) and, late in the book, to a prehistoric Earth, where he becomes the Secret Master ruler of the primitive inhabitants, Uplifting them through selective breeding (see Eugenics) into Homo sapiens. The next volume, The Stone Giant: A Story of the Mammoth Cave (1898), moves into a Hollow Earth venue. It is presented as a translation by Willmoth of the memoirs of the prehistoric ruler Wymorian, an 8ft (2.4m) giant and founder of Atlantis, who had been given (by descendants of Willmoth) an elixir of life. Sex is approved of throughout. There is much talk about the ethics of the Immortality experiment, which on the whole is a failure – as, notoriously, was Atlantis. There are some tonal echoes of the titular model for the sequence, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820 4vols), but beyond the issue of immortality they are not significant. [PN/JC]
Charles Curtis Dail
born Kentucky: 5 January 1851
died Kansas City, Kansas: 27 April 1902
works
series
Willmoth
- Willmoth the Wanderer, Or The Man from Saturn (Atchison, Kansas: Haskell Printing Company, 1890) [Willmoth: hb/]
- Willmoth the Wanderer (New York: J S Ogilvie, 1891) [rev vt of the above: Willmoth: hb/]
- The Stone Giant: A Story of the Mammoth Cave (New York: F Tennyson Neely, 1898) [Willmoth: hb/]
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