Charles Somerville

Born in New Orleans in 1876, Charles Cecil Lee D’Montrol Somerville built his career first in newspapers. According to the Harry Ransom Center’s notes on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door, he started as a reporter in Mount Vernon, later worked in Asheville and Philadelphia, and then settled in New York City, writing for papers including the Evening Journal, the New York American, and The World.

Somerville also worked as an illustrator, and that mix of visual wit and newsroom experience seems to have carried into his fiction. Surviving records link him to works such as A Woman’s Way and An Artist in Crime, while readers today may know him best for The Shriek: A Satirical Burlesque.

He died in 1931. While detailed biographical information appears to be limited, the available sources show a versatile literary figure who moved easily between journalism, illustration, and popular fiction.