Hugh B. Cave

Hugh B. Cave (July 11, 1910 – June 27, 2004) was a true king of the pulp-fictioneers — one of the most prolific and successful authors of the golden pulp era. Cave sold his first story in 1929 and never looked back; he went on to write over 1000 stories — approximately 800 of those during the 1930s — under so many pseudonyms and appearing in so many magazines that nary a pulp can be named in which Cave did not appear under one name or another. He was a notable contributor to all of the big-name pulps of the time, including Black Mask, Weird Tales, Argosy, all of the weird-menace shudder-pulp titles, and so many more they would be difficult to list. Cave served in the armed forces during World War II as a war correspondant, then spent many years in both Haiti and Jamaica, which provided him foundational knowledge for many of the voodoo-based horror novels he wrote later in life. After World War II, he went on to sell another 350 or so stories to the slicks. In 1977, Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa Press released a landmark collection of horror fiction by Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others, which won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. He continued to write and publish novels until his death. Cave is truly one of the most accomplished, and yet largely unsung, pulp-fictioneers. He died in Florida at the age of 93.