Charles Neville Buck

Biography

April 15, 1879: a spring day in Midway, Woodford County, Kentucky, when Charles Lunsford Neville Buck entered the world, son of Judge Charles William Buck and Elizabeth Crow Bullitt. Two decades later he traded bluegrass for the Ohio River, enrolling at Cincinnati’s Academy of Art (1898-99) and reportedly leaving with a diploma the following spring—though the parchment itself has vanished. Ink proved more durable than paint: by 1899 he was skewering city politics as a cartoonist for Louisville’s Evening Post, and by 1900 he had slipped behind the newsroom curtain, filing stories for the combined Evening Post & Morning Herald until 1908. Between deadlines he moonlighted across town at the University of Louisville, collecting a law degree in 1902 and passing the bar that same year—then promptly locked the license in a drawer. Fiction finally called. In 1908 he abandoned the city beat, hammering out short stories that crescendoed into his debut novel, The Key to Yesterday (1910). Over the next twenty-two years he produced twenty-three more books—nine of them snapped up by silent-film studios; eight have since dissolved into nitrate dust, leaving only one reel still breathing. Love arrived in Manhattan: on 20 June 1918 he married Margaret Field DeMotte, who brought along her young son John; the couple added no further branches to the family tree. After 1932 the storyteller himself stepped off the page. No byline, no census entry, no gossip-column whisper—until the final scene in Brookline, Massachusetts, August 1957.