Margaret Cameron

Margaret Cameron (after first marriage, Lewis; after second marriage, Kilvert; December 21, 1867 – February 4, 1947) was an American musician and writer. Most of Cameron's writing was humorous. May Lamberton Becker, outlining in the New York Evening Post a course of study in American humor, mentioned Margaret Cameron as one of the three women humorists thus far produced by the country. Cameron wrote several one-act plays for amateurs, a variety of short stories, two books on travel, one of which, The Involuntary Chaperon, was considered to be the first South American travel book published in the U.S.;

Early life and education Margaret Cameron was born in Ottawa, Illinois, December 21, 1867. She was the daughter of Alexander Tulloch Cameron, a lawyer, Scotch born, but brought to the U.S. in 1842. Her mother was Nancy Anna Nelson, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, of Scotch and English ancestry. Her father struggled with an illness contracted in the American Civil War, and when Margaret was nine years old, the family moved from Illinois to Santa Barbara, California, hoping thereby to benefit his health. Mr. Cameron died at the age of 37, when Margaret wasten years old. who was the general manager and vice-president of the National Paper & Type Company, exporting printer's materials to Latin American countries. He had been a playmate of her childhood in Illinois, but after going to California, she had seen nothing of him until she went as a delegate from a San Francisco Club to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in 1893, where she met him again. Several visits to Mexico, between 1905 and 1909, gave her material for The Pretender Person (1911), which was illustrated with photographs. Two or three trips to Europe, including on in 1906, and many across the U.S. did not appear in her fiction.

Not driven to work by financial pressure, her writing was an avocation, but she published occasional books and frequent short stories until 1912, including Tangles (1912), a collection of short stories. In that same year, though, the Mexican Revolution brought keen business anxieties to her husband. This, followed by the World War, created a hiatus in Mrs. Lewis’ writing, for she found the kind of fiction she had always written unthinkable during these crises. She said she did not feel humorous, and she refused to inflict upon a suffering world anything that reflected the way she did feel. It was a clear, straightforward report of actual occurrences, published somewhat reluctantly and only because the obligation of service, the necessity of sharing this experience with those whom it might help, outweighed with the writer any personal shrinking from possible ridicule. The Seven Purposes was probably the work by which she was best known. It tells the story of the beginning of her own experiences with psychic phenomena. This book almost immediately was a best seller and exerted a wide influence. Both her publishers and her public were surprised by this departure from her accustomed writing, but no one else was as profoundly astonished as she was herself by what she had to report, for she had no tendency toward mysticism and no inclination to speculate about things unseen. He won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1947, a week before his wife died.

Margaret Cameron died at her home in Winter Park, Florida, February 4, 1947.

Selected works

Plays A Pipe of Peace, a comedy in one act, 1910 (text) A Christmas Chime, a play in one act, 1910 (text) Miss Doulton's Orchids, a comedy in two acts, 1910 (text)

Novels Comedies in Miniature, 1903 (text) The Cat and the Canary, 1908 (text) The Bachelor and the Baby, 1908 (text) The Teeth of the Gift Horse, 1909 (text) The Involuntary Chaperon, 1909 (text) The Pretender Person, 1911 (text) Round about the Seashore, 1912 The Golden Rule Dollivers, 1913 (text) Johndover, 1924 (text) A Sporting Chance, 1926 (text)

Mysticism The Seven Purposes: An Experience in Psychic Phenomena, 1918 (text) Twelve Lessons from The Seven Purposes, 1919 (text)

Short story collections Tangles: Tales of Some Droll Predicaments, 1912 (text)