Hildreth, Charles Lotin
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1853-1896) US journalist, poet, and author of a Lost Race Young Adult novel, The Mysterious City of OO: Adventures in Orbello Land (1889; vt OO: Adventures in Orbello Land 1889), set in the Australian outback. The teenaged protagonist, searching for his father who had disappeared years earlier, finds a lost, subterranean civilization – possibly of ancient Greek origins – flourishing among the Aboriginal natives. Hildreth also wrote some short horror stories, but his most enduring creations were two human oddities described in his hoax newspaper article "The Wonders of Modern Science: Some Half Human Monsters Once Thought to Be of the Devil's Brood" (8 December 1895 The Boston Sunday Post): the Four-Eyed Man of Cricklade, and Edward Mordake, an English peer with a second face on the back of his head. These characters, unlike his prose fiction, have survived to the present day in popular culture. [JC/LW]
Charles Lotin Hildreth
born New York: 28 August 1853
died New York: 22 August 1896
works
- The Mysterious City of OO: Adventures in Orbello Land (Chicago, Illinois: Belford Clarke Co, 1889) [hb/]
- OO: Adventures in Orbello Land (New York: Belford Company, 1889) [vt of the above: hb/]
links
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