Hugh B. Cave - Life

Life

Born in Chester, England, Hugh B. Cave moved during his childhood with his family to Boston, Massachusetts, following the outbreak of World War I. His first name was in honor of Hugh Walpole, a favorite author of his mother, a nurse, who had once known Rudyard Kipling.

Cave attended Brookline High School. After graduating, Cave attended Boston University on a scholarship but had to leave when his father was severely injured. He worked initially for a vanity press, the only regular job he would ever have. He quit this position at age 20 to write for a living.

From 1932 until his death in 1997, Cave corresponded extensively with fellow pulp writer Carl Richard Jacobi. Selections of this correspondence can be found in Cave's memoir Magazines I Remember. Relations with his fellow pulp writers were not always so cordial. In the 1930s, Cave lived in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, but he never met H.P. Lovecraft, who lived in nearby Providence. The two engaged in a heated exchange of correspondence (non-extant) regarding the ethics and aesthetics of writing for the pulps. At least two of Cave's stories are loosely attached to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos - "The Isle of Dark Magic" and "The Death Watch".

During World War II Cave travelled as a reporter around the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. Following the war he moved to the Caribbean, spending five years in Haiti, after which he rebuilt and managed a successful coffee plantation in Jamaica. He returned to the United States in the early 1970s after the Jamaican government stole his plantation.

Hugh Cave was twice married, first to Margaret Long in a union that produced two sons before the couple began living apart, and Peggy (or Peggie) Thompson, who died in 2001. Cave was 93 when he died in Vero Beach, Florida, in 2004. His remains were cremated.

A photograph of Cave can be found at: