August Derleth

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August William Derleth (February 24, 1909-July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist.

Derleth, who is best known as the first book publisher of H. P. Lovecraft's books and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the Cosmic Horror genre, as well as his establishment of the publisher Arkham House (which helped to bring supernatural fiction into print in the United States, which had only been widely available in the United States), was a well-known American regional writer of his day, as well as several others, including historical fiction, poetry, crime, detective fiction, as well- Derleth, a 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, considered his most serious work to be the exciting Sac Prairie Saga, a series of horror, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works intended to celebrate life in the Wisconsin he knew.

In his writing, Derleth can also be regarded as a pioneering naturalist and conservator.

Life

William Julius Derleth and Rose Louise Volk, Derleth's uncle, grew up in Sauk City, Wisconsin. He was educated in a local parochial and public high school. At the age of 13, Derleth wrote his first story. He was most interested in reading, and he made three trips to the library a week. (his personal library surpassed 12,000 volumes later in life) He would save his money to buy books. Ralph Waldo Emerson's papers, Walt Whitman, H. L. Mencken's The American Mercury, Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, Alexandre Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Scott, and Henry David Thoreau's Walden were among his major influences.

According to anthologist Jim Stephens, Forty rejected stories three years after. He sold his first story, "Bat's Belfry," to Weird Tales magazine. Derleth wrote during his four years at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his B.A. In 1930, the first automobile was built in 1930. During this time, he served as associate editor of Fawcett Publications Mystic Magazine, which was published in Minneapolis.

Dieleth, who returned to Sauk City in 1931, worked in a local canning plant and collaborated with childhood friend Mark Schorer (later Chairman of the University of California's Berkeley English Department). They rented a cabin, wrote Gothic and other horror stories, and sold them to Weird Tales magazine. Five Alone's O'Brien Roll of Honor for Five Alone, published in Place of Hawks, was first discovered in a Pagany journal.

Derleth was granted the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship as a result of his early work on the Sac Lake Saga; his sponsors were Helen C. White, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis and poet Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology fame.

Derleth, who served as both a clerk and president of the local school board, established a local men's club and a parent-teacher group in the 1930s. He also taught American regional literature at the University of Wisconsin and was a contributing editor of Outdoors Magazine.

Arkham House was founded by longtime friend Donald Wandleth, who died in 1939. Its initial aim was to release H. P. Lovecraft's works, with whom Derleth had corresponded since his teen years. He also began teaching an American Regional Literature course at the University of Wisconsin.

He became the literary editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1941, a post he held until his resignation in 1960. His hobbies included fencing, swimming, chess, philately, and comic-strips (Derleth reportedly used the funds from his Guggenheim Fellowship to bind his comic book collection, rather than traveling abroad as the award was intended). However, Derleth's true calling was walking the trails of his native Wisconsin lands and photographing and recording nature with an expert eye.

"I write very quickly, from 750,000 to a million words a year, but very little of it pulp content," Derleth once wrote of his writing methods.

At the 6th World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 1948, he was elected president of the Associated Fantasy Publishers.

He was married to Sandra Evelyn Winters on April 6, 1953. They divorced six years ago. May Rose and Walden William were retained by the couple's two children, Derleth. In 1977, April received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1994, she became a majority stockholder and CEO of Arkham House. She was in that position until her death. She was known as a naturalist and humanitarian in the neighborhood. On March 21, 2011, April was born in April.

Derleth began editing and releasing Hawk and Whippoorwill, a journal dedicated to poems of man and nature in 1960.

Derleth died of a heart attack on July 4, 1971, and is buried in Sauk City's St. Aloysius Cemetery. In his honor, the Wisconsin River 12 bridge over the Wisconsin River has been named. Derleth was Roman Catholic.

According to Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky's biography, Derleth was bisexual and had long-term intimate relationships with both men and women. This allegation has not been verified, however; no names were given of these intimate partners in the interest of anonymity, according to Litersky, and no evidence or hint of Derleth's homosexual or homosexual orientation was ever found in his personal correspondence or writings.

Source

Career

During his lifetime, Derleth wrote more than 150 short stories and more than 100 books.

Derleth wrote an extensive collection of novels, short stories, journals, poetry, and other Sac Prairie-related works. Derleth intended that the series to contain up to 50 books describing the area's predicted life-story from the 19th century to today, with parallels to Balzac's Human Comedy and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Hamlin Garland and Zona Gale, as well as Sinclair Lewis, the last both an admirer and critic of Derleth, made him a well-known figure among the regional literary figures of his time: early Pulitzer Prize winners Hamlin Garland and Zona Gale, as well as Sinclair Lewis, the last both an admirer and critic of Derleth.

"What Mr. Derleth has that is lacking...in modern novelists generally," Edward Wagenknecht wrote in Cavalcade of the American Novel. He is a member of the United States. He writes about a land and a people that are bone and flesh of his flesh. There is a much deeper and more subtle connection in his fictional world than can be attributed to an ideology. It's also obvious that he did not get the most useful, and also visually useful, part of his background information from library study; rather than Scott, he gives the appearance of drinking it in his mother's milk.

"What Derleth did was to gather a Wisconsin mythos that paid tribute to our ancient fundament of modern life," Jim Stephens, editor of An August Derleth Reader (1992).

With four novellas including Place of Hawks, which was published by Loring & Mussey in 1935, the author launched the Sac Prairie Saga. "Certainly with this book Mr. Derleth can be added to the American writers of distinction," The Detroit News said at its publication.

Still is the Summer Night, Derleth's first book, was released two years after by the celebrated Scribners' editor Maxwell Perkins, and it was the second in his Sac Prairie Saga.

"A book of immediate responsiveness resurfaces, restores its position with alertness and beauty, and makes an unusual contribution to the Americana of the present day," Village Year, the first in a series of journals, was published in 1941. "Derleth...deepens the value of his village setting by presenting in full; with the people who oppose this, the piece comes to have the appearance of an old Flemish picture, humanity amusing and loveable in the foreground and majestic beyond." "Derleth has produced a kind of prose equivalent of the Spoon River Anthology," James Grey, writing in the St. Louis Dispatch.

Evening in Spring by Charles Scribners & Sons was released in the same year. Derleth's work is regarded as one of his finest. What the Milwaukee Journal called "this gorgeous little love tale" is an autobiographical book of first love set against small-town religious bigotry. The work received critical praise: The New Yorker thought it was a tale told "with tenderness and charm," while the Chicago Tribune announced that "It's as if he turned back the pages of an old diary and was told, with renewed emotion, of the pangs of pain and the strong, vivid sweetness of a boy's first love." In The Capital Times, Helen Constance White said that it was "the most fully disciplined, the most fully disciplined of his stories."

These were followed by Shadow of Night, a Scribners' book in 1943, and an adventure story that is unique and inspiring.

However, Derleth's work was shattered by his one-time admirer and mentor, Sinclair Lewis, in November 1945. Lewis, Esquire, wrote, "It is a demonstration of Mr. Derleth's charm" that he makes the trip and see his specific Avalon on its islands, as well as Baron Pierneau and Hercules Dousman's castles. He is both a defender and a promoter of regionalism. Despite this, he is still a burly, tieding, burgeoning, opinionated, and badly distressed young man with injuries so grievous that a melancholy perusal of them could be more useful to apprentices than a review of his academic merits. If he were ever persuaded that he isn't half as good as he claims, he could be twice as good as he is, which would about place him in second place as Homer. Derleth Goodluck reprinted the article along with a photograph of him without a sweater on the back cover of his 1948 country journal Village Daybook.

A lighter twist to the Sac Prairie Saga is a collection of quasi-autobiographical short stories titled "Gus Elker Stories," amusing tales of country life written by Peter Ruber, Derleth's last editor, "including models of construction and...fused with some of the most memorable characters in American literature." The bulk of stories were written between 1934 and the late 1940s, although the last, "Tail of the Dog," was published in 1959 and received the Scholastic Magazine short story award for the year. In 1996, Country Matters was assembled and republished.

Walden West, who was born in 1961, is considered by many Derleth's finest works. "The'most men live lives of quiet desperation,'" is the main reason for this prose meditation, which is based on three primary subjects: "the tenacity of memory," the country's sounds and odors... and Thoreau's suggestion that the majority of men live lives of silence. A collection of nature writing, philosophical musings, and careful examination of the people and place of "Sac Prairie." "Derleth's Walden West is...the equivalent of Sherwood Anderson's "Your Town," George Vukelich, author of "North Country Notebook," writes of his book "North Country Notebook." Return to Walden West, an eight-year anniversary work of similar quality, but with a more prominent environmentalist edge to the writing, according to critic Norbert Blei.

Derleth's Wisconsin Saga, which contains many historical books, was a close literary cousin of the Sac Prairie Saga.

Detective fiction was yet another significant body of Derleth's work. The most notable of this collection was a collection of 70 stories in Sherlock Holmes' affectionate pastiche, whose creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, admired greatly. One published book as well (Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey) was included in this series. Solar Pons, a (Sherlock Holmes-styled) British detective from 7B Praed Street in London, appears in the series. The series was greatly admired by such writers and researchers of mystery and detective fiction as Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay), Anthony Boucher, Vincent Startt, and Howard Haycraft.

"How many budding writers, not even old enough to vote," Ellery Queen wrote of Derleth's The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: "How many budding authors, not even old enough to vote, may have captured the feeling and atmosphere with as much fidelity." "And his selection of the euphonic Solar Pons is an intriguing addition to Sherlockian nomenclature's rich lore." In his foreword to the 1964 edition of The Casebook of Solar Pons, Vincent Startt wrote, "The series is as dazzling a galaxy of Sherlockian pastiches as we have seen since the canonical entertainments came to an end."

Pons lived in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, despite close resemblances to Doyle's conception. Although Derleth never wrote a Pons book to match the Baskervilles, editor Peter Ruber wrote: "Derleth wrote more than a few Solar Pons stories just as good as Sir Arthur's, and some that had better plot construction."

Although these stories were a form of diversion for Derleth Ruber, the author of The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus Edition (2000), "Because the novels were generally of such high quality, they should be judged on their own merits as a unique contribution to Sherlock Holmes' annals, rather than being compared to one of Sherlock Holmes' endless imitators."

Several of the stories were self-published by a new imprint called "Mycroft & Moran," an appellation of comedic value to Holmesian scholars. The Praed Street Irregulars, patterned after the Baker Street Irregulars, have been an active support group for nearly a decade.

Conan Doyle's two sons tried to persuade Derleth not to publish the Solar Pons series in 1946, but the attempts were unsuccessful and the project was eventually scrapped.

The mystery and detective fiction by Derleth also included a series of works set in Sac Prairie, with Judge Peck as the central protagonist.

Derleth wrote a number of children's books, ranging from biographies designed to introduce younger readers to explorer Jacques Marquette to explorer Jacques Marquette, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The Steve and Sim Mystery Series, also known as the Mill Creek Irregulars series, is perhaps the most significant of his younger readers' books. The ten-volume series, which was published between 1958 and 1970, is set in Sac Prairie of the 1920s, and can therefore be considered as part of the Sac Prairie Saga as well as an extension of Derleth's body of mystery fiction. "Steve and Sim, the main characters, are twentieth-century cousins of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, according to Robert Hood's writing in the New York Times; Derleth's minor characters are little gems of comic drawing." In fact, The Moon Tenders, the first book in the series, does involve a rafting adventure down the Wisconsin River, causing regional writer Jesse Stuart to say that the book was one for "older people to rekindle the spirit and dream of youth." The Chicago Tribune highlighted the Sac Prairie Saga's history: "Once more a small midwest community in 1920s is depicted with confidence, expertise, and dry humor."

Derleth, a correspondent and friend of H.P. Lovecraft, wrote about "le Comte d'Erlette" in his book when Lovecraft wrote about it. Derleth created the word "Cthulhu Mythos" to describe the fictional universe depicted in Lovecraft's collection of stories in his circle.

When Lovecraft died in 1937, Derleth and Donald Wandeth assembled a collection of Lovecraft's stories and published them. Existing publishers showed no enthusiasm, so Derleth and Wandlin founded Arkham House in 1939 for that purpose. The company's name derives from Lovecraft's fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, which appears in several of his stories. Arkham House released The Outsider and Others, a huge collection that included the majority of Lovecraft's known short stories in 1939. After its second book, Someone in the Dark, a collection of some of Derleth's own horror stories, was published in 1941, Derleth and Wandlin immediately expanded to a regular publishing schedule.

Derleth wrote a number of stories based on fragments and notes left by Lovecraft following Lovecraft's death. These were published in Weird Tales and then in book form under the name "H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth," with Derleth referring to him as a "posthumous collaborator." Thousands of protesters in some quarters have sparked questions about the fact that Derleth simply used Lovecraft's name to market what was essentially his own fiction; S. T. Joshi sees "the beginning of "perhaps the most disreputable phase of Derleth's activities" as the start of "perhaps the most disruptive phase of the company's life.

Dirk W. Mosig, S. T. Joshi, and Richard L. Tierney were dissatisfied with Derleth's invention of the term Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft himself used Yog-Sothothery) and his description of Lovecraft's story as having an overall pattern based on Derleth's religious world view, which contrastes with Lovecraft's depiction of an amoral universe. However, Robert M. Price points out that although Derleth's stories are different from Lovecraft's in their use of hope and characterization of a conflict between good and evil, the basis for Derlerth's systemization are discovered in Lovecraft. He also claims that the differences can be exaggerated:

Lovecraft's Great Old Ones were also treated as representatives of elemental powers, thereby constructing new fictional entities to flesh out this framework.

Despite such debates, Derleth's establishment of Arkham House and his triumph in rescuing Lovecraft from literary oblivion are well-known among horror researchers as seminal events in the field. For example, Ramsey Campbell has lauded Derleth's support and support during the early stages of his own writing career, while Kirby McCauley has referred to Derleth and Arkham House as inspiration for his own anthology Dark Forces. As well, Arkham House and Derleth published Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury's first book. In a 2009 introduction to Derleth's work, Brian Lumley cites the importance of the city's Lovecraftian work as "one of the first, most discerning editors and publishers of macabre fiction."

As Derleth's efforts to save H.P., it was highly regarded. Lovecraft came from literary obscurity at the time of Lovecraft's death, but Derleth created a body of horror and spectral fiction of his own, which is also anthologized. Derleth's original contributions to the field were shown in four volumes of short stories, most of which were originally published in Weird Tales. Although Derleth regarded his contribution to this field less significant than his more formal literary pursuits, these four anthologies' editors, including Ramsey Campbell, note that the tales remain popular after more than 50 years.

The Library of America selected Derleth's story The Panelled Room for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales.

Derleth wrote several historical books as part of both the Sac Lake Saga and the Wisconsin Saga. He also wrote history; the Wisconsin River of a Thousand Isles, arguably the most famous of these, was released in 1942. The piece was the first in a series entitled "The Rivers of America," designed by writer Constance Lindsay Skinner in the Great Depression as a series of events that will connect Americans to their roots through the country's great rivers. Skinner intended that the book be written by artists, not academics. Although not a trained historian, Derleth was, according to former Wisconsin state historian William F. Thompson, "...a very good regional historian who grounded his historical writing on primary sources and who frequently sought the assistance of experts." "I was very disappointed." Thompson wrote: "No other writer, no matter what background or education, knew and appreciated his particular "corner of the earth" better than August Derleth" in the foreword to The University of Wisconsin Press' 1985 reissue.

In addition, Derleth wrote a number of volumes of poetry. The Decker Press, which also printed the work of other Midwestern writers such as Edgar Lee Masters, published three of his books, including Rind of Earth (1942), Selected Poems (1944), and The Edge of Night (1945).

Derleth was also the author of many biographies of other writers, including Zona Gale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

In addition, he wrote introductions to several classic early twentieth century comics, including Buster Brown, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Katzenjammer Kids, as well as a book of children's poetry titled A Boy's Way, Phebe Jewell Nichols' foreword to Tales from an Indian Lodge. Stephen Grendon, Kenyon Holmes, and Tally Mason also wrote under the pen name Stephen Grendon.

Derleth's papers were donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.

Source

Awards

• O'Brien Roll of Honour for short story, 1933
• Guggenheim fellow, 1938