[Gutenberg 20126] • The Cave of Gold / A Tale of California in '49

Henry Everett McNeil (1862 - December 1929) was a leading children's author of the 1910s and 1920s, and was an original and core member of the Kalem Club circle around the writer H. P. Lovecraft. McNeil played a crucial role in the career of H.P. Lovecraft, in that he was the first to urge Lovecraft to submit his fiction to Weird Tales magazine in the early 1920s McNeil's fiction was published under the name 'Everett McNeil' and consisted of boys' adventure books and stories for magazines such as Boy's Life. His tales were historical in setting, often featuring immense wild landscapes, and were "addressed to boys, written for boys" without any moralistic preaching or many political details. In book form his fiction appears to have retained a popularity from the 1900s into the 1950s, when it went out of fashion. Three of his books form a trilogy: The Hermit of the Culebra Mountains (1904); The Lost Treasure Cave (1905); and The Lost Nation (1918). Most of his novels were published by E.P. Dutton. McNeil also wrote short stories and magazine articles, and occasional humorous poetry