The most read James De Mille book is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. It was serialized anonymously and posthumously in Harper's Weekly, and Harper and Brothers of New York City released it as a book in 1888. Following that, it was serialized in the UK and Australia and published as a book in the UK and Canada. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, later versions were printed using the plates of the first Harper & Brothers edition. The satirical and fantastical romance is based on an imagined semi-tropical continent in Antarctica that is home to prehistoric monsters and a group of people who worship death known as the Kosekin. It predates the exotic setting and fantasy-adventure elements of works of the "Lost World genre," such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, as well as countless prehistoric world movies loosely based on these and other works, and was written many years before it was published. It is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Edgar Allan Poe's Ms. Found in a Bottle served as both the source for the title and the setting.
James De Mille was a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and an early Canadian author who wrote a number of works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s. He was born on August 23, 1833, and he passed away on January 28, 1880. De Mille, the son of businessman and shipowner Nathan De Mille, was born in Saint John, New Brunswick. He studied for a year at Acadia University after attending Horton Academy in Wolfville. After that, he went to Europe with his brother Elisha Budd, spending a half-year in England, France, and Italy, where he was inspired to write several of his masterpieces. He attended Brown University shortly after arriving back in North America, where he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1854. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which was serialized posthumously in the journal Harper's Weekly and published in book form by Harper & Brothers of New York City in 1888, is the most well-liked work among his contemporaries and the work for which he is currently best known. He worked there until 1865 when he agreed to a new position as a professor of English and rhetoric at Dalhousie.
