Westall, William
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1835-1903) UK author and journalist, resident for much of his life in Switzerland, where he served as foreign correspondent for The Times of London; he also travelled in South America and elsewhere. The explorer protagonist of The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (1886) travels by Balloon to a Lost-World race of Incans hidden in a Guatemalan volcano, where they maintain a pre-Conquest level of civilization. A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People (1887) is set on an Island populated by a Lost Race of Elizabethan Englishmen who have undergone strange mutations in their pigmentation (see Mutants). Don or Devil? (21 July-1 December 1900 Pearson's Short Story Magazine; 1901) is another Lost World tale, set in the lost city of Manoa in Venezuela, where descendants of Elizabethan Englishmen breed with and combat natives. [JE/EFB/JC]
see also: Anthropology.
William Bury Westall
born White Ash, near Blackburn, Lancashire: 7 February 1835
died Heathfield, Sussex: 9 September 1903
works
- Tales and Legends of Saxony and Lusatia (London: Griffith and Farran, 1877) [coll: hb/]
- Tales and Traditions of Switzerland (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882) [coll: hb/]
- The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (London: Cassell and Co, 1886) [hb/]
- A Queer Race: The Story of a Strange People (London: Cassell and Co, 1887) [hb/uncredited]
- Nigel Fortescue; or, the Hunted Man: An Andean Romance (London: Ward and Downey, 1888) [hb/]
- Mr Fortescue: An Andean Romance (New York: Appleton, 1888) [vt of the above: pb/]
- Don or Devil? (London: C Arthur Pearson, 1901) [first appeared 21 July-1 December 1900 Pearson's Magazine Short Story Magazine: hb/]
links
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