Charles Neville Buck

Charles Neville Buck was an American novelist born in Woodford County, Kentucky, on April 15, 1879, and he died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on August 10, 1957. He studied at the University of Louisville, worked first as a cartoonist and then as a reporter in Kentucky, and later moved to New York after his fiction found success.

His best-known work is The Call of the Cumberlands (1913), and much of his writing drew on Kentucky mountain settings, local traditions, and the pull between old ways and modern life. During the silent-film era, a number of his novels were adapted for the screen, which helped expand his readership beyond book audiences.

Buck was a prolific writer, publishing novels from the 1910s into the early 1930s, and he also wrote under the pseudonym Hugh Lundsford. Although he is less widely remembered today than some of his contemporaries, his fiction still offers a lively window into the popular adventure and regional storytelling of his time.