Emerson, Willis George
Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1856-1918) US criminal entrepreneur and author, involved in at least one mining fraud and a stock fraud late in life, the latter involving the Emerson Motor Company, whose cars were disguised Fords. Most of his novels were Westerns, whose Lost World novel The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908; vt as coll, The Smoky God and Other Inner Earth Mysteries 1993) is set in 1829 in a Hollow-Earth Eden on the John Cleves Symmes model, where a scientifically advanced race of long-lived giants is discovered worshipping its "smoky god", which is the interior sun. Eventually the protagonist, who has arrived via the Arctic Symmes Hole, leaves via the Antarctic, and is thought mad for many years. [JC]
Willis George Emerson
born Monroe County, Iowa: 28 March 1856
died Los Angeles, California: 11 December 1918
works
- The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World (Chicago, Illinois: Forbes and Co, 1908) [illus/John A Williams: hb/uncredited]
- The Smoky God and Other Inner Earth Mysteries (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Inner Light Publications, 1993) [coll: The Smoky God as above, plus articles claiming to show that the tale is nonfiction: pb/]
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