James De Mille was a professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and an early Canadian popular writer who published numerous works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s.
His most popular work with contemporaries, and the work for which he is most known today, is A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, which was serialized posthumously in Harper's Weekly, and published in book form by Harper and Brothers of New York City in 1888.
