August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror, Derleth was a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction,science fiction, and biography. A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing. The son of William Julius Derleth and his wife Rose Louise Volk, he grew up in Sauk City, Wisconsin.[1] He was educated in local parochial and public high school. Derleth wrote his first fiction at age 13. Forty rejected stories and three years later, according to anthologist Jim Stephens, he sold his first story, "Bat's Belfrey", to Weird Tales magazine. Derleth wrote throughout his four years at the University of Wisconsin, where he received a B.A. in 1930.[2] During this time he also served briefly as associate editor of Minneapolist-based Fawcett Publications Mystic Magazine. Returning to Sauk City in the summer of 1931, Derleth worked in a local canning factory and collaborated with childhood friend Mark Schorer (later to become Department Chair of the University of California, Berkeley English Department) writing Gothic and other horror stories. As a result of his early work on the Sac Prairie Saga, Derleth was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship; his sponsors were Helen C. White,noted mid-western novelist Sinclair Lewis and similarly notable poet, Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology fame. In the mid-1930s, Derleth organized a Ranger's Club for young people, served as clerk and president of the local board of education, served as a parole officer, organized a local men's club and a parent-teacher association.[3] He also lectured in American regional literature at the University of Wisconsin and was a contributing editor of Outdoors Magazine. With longtime friend Donald Wandrei, Derleth in 1939 founded Arkham House. Its initial objective was to publish the works of H.P Lovecraft, with whom Derleth had corresponded since his teenage years. At the same time, he began teaching a course in American Regional Literature at the University of Wisconsin. In 1941, he became literary editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, a post he held until his resignation in 1960. His hobbies included fencing, swimming, chess, stamp-collecting and comic-strips (Derleth reportedly deployed the funding from his Guggenheim Fellowship to bind his comic book collection, most recently valued in the millions of dollars, rather than to travel abroad as the award intended.). Derleth's true avocation, however, was hiking the terrain of his native Wisconsin lands, and observing and recording nature with an expert eye. Derleth once wrote of his writing methods that "I write very swiftly, from 750,000 to a million words yearly, very little of it pulp material." Derleth was married April 6, 1953, to Sandra Evelyn Winters; they were divorced six years later.[2] His bisexuality has been asserted in the biography by Dorothy Litersky. He retained custody of their two children, April Rose and Walden William. April Rose is the current manager of Arkham House. In 1960, Derleth began editing and publishing a magazine called Hawk and Whippoorwill, dedicated to poems of man and nature. Derleth died of a massive and sudden heart attack on July 4, 1971,[4] and is buried in St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sauk City.[1]. Derleth wrote more than 150 short stories and more than 100 books during his lifetime. Derleth wrote an expansive series of novels, short stories, journals, poems, and other works about Sac Prairie (whose prototype is Sauk City). Derleth intended this series to comprise up to 50 novels telling the projected life-story of the region from the 1800s onwards, and considered it among the most ambitious projects undertaken in the history of literature, with analogies to Balzac's Human Comedy and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. This, and other early work by 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 latter both an admirer and critic of Derleth. As Edward Wagenknecht writes in Cavalcade of the American Novel: "What Mr. Derleth has that is lacking...in modern novelists generally, is a country. He belongs. He writes of a land and a people that are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In his fictional world, there is a unity much deeper and more fundamental than anything that can be conferred by an ideology. It is clear, too, that he did not get the best, and most fictionally useful, part of his background material from research in the libarary; like Scott, in his Border novels, he gives, rather, the impression of having drunk it in with his mother's milk." Jim Stephens, editor of An August Derleth Reader, (1992), argues: "what Derleth accomplished....was to gather a Wisconsin mythos which gave respect to the ancient fundament of our contemporary life." The author inaugurated the Sac Pairie Saga with four novellas comprising Place of Hawks, published by Loring & Mussey in 1935. At publication, The Detroit News wrote: "Certainly with this book Mr. Derleth may be added to the American writers of distinction." Derleth's first novel, Still is the Summer Night, was published two years later by the famous Charles Scribners' editor Maxwell Perkins, and was the second in his Sac Pairie Saga. Village Year, the first in a series of journals–meditations on nature, Midwestern village American life, and more–was published in 1941 to praise from The New York Times Book Review: "A book of instant sensitive responsiveness...recreates its scene with acuteness and beauty, and makes an unusual contribution to the Americana of the present day." The New York Herald Tribune observed that "Derleth...deepens the value of his village setting by presenting in full the enduring natural background; with the people projected against this, the writing comes to have the quality of an old Flemish picture, humanity lively and amusing and loveable in the foreground and nature magnificent beyond." James Grey, writing in the St. Louis Dispatch concluded, "Derleth has achieved a kind of prose equivalent of the Spoon River Anthology." In the same year, Evening in Spring was published by Charles Scribners & Sons. This work Derleth considered among his finest. What The Milwaukee Journal called "this beautiful little love story," is an autobiographical novel of first love beset by small town religious bigotry. The work received critical praise: The New Yorker considered it a story told "with tenderness and charm," while the Chicago Tribune concluded: "It's as though he turned back the pages of an old diary and told, with rekindled emotion, of the pangs of pain and the sharp, clear sweetness of a boy's first love." Helen Constance White, wrote in The Capital Times that it was "...the best articulated, the most fully disciplined of his stories." These were followed in 1943 with Shadow of Night, a Scribners' novel of which The Chicago Sun wrote: "Structurally it has the perfection of a carved jewel...A psychological novel of the first order, and an adventure tale that is unique and inspiriting." In November 1945, however, Derleth's work was attacked by his one-time admirer and mentor, Sinclair Lewis. Writing in Esquire, Lewis said, "It is a proof of Mr. Derleth's merit that he makes one want to make the journey and see his particular Avalon: The Wisconsin River shining among its islands, and the castles of Baron Pierneau and Hercules Dousman. He is a champion and a justification of regionalism. Yet he is also a burly, bounding, bustling, self-confident, opinionated, and highly sweatered young man with faults so grievous that a melancholoy perusal of them may be of more value to apprentices than a study of his serious virtues. If he could ever be persuaded that he isn't half as good as he thinks he is, if he would learn the art of sitting still and using a blue pencil, he might become twice as good as he thinks he is–which would about rank him with Homer." Derleth good humoredly reprinted the criticism along with a photograph of himself sans sweater, on the back cover of his 1948 country journal: Village Daybook. A lighter side to the Sac Prairie Saga was a series of quasi-autobiographical short stories known as the "Gus Elker Stories," amusing tales of country life that Peter Ruber, his last editor, said were "...models of construction and...fused with some of the most memorable characters in American literature." Most were written between 1934 and the late 1940s, though the last, "Tail of the Dog", was published in 1959 and won Scholastic Magazine's short story award for the year. The entire series was collected and republished in Country Matters in 1996. "Walden West," published in 1961 is considered by many to be Derleth's finest work. This prose meditation is built out of the same fundamental material as his series of Sac Prairie journals, but organized around three themes: "the persistence of memory...the sounds and odors of the country...and Thoreau's observation that the 'mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'" A blend of nature writing, philosophic musings, and careful observation of the people and place of "Sac Prairie." Of this work, George Vukelich, author of "North Country Notebook," writes: "Derleth's Walden West is...the equal of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,Ohio, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology." This was followed eight years later by "Return to Walden West," a work of similar quality. A close literary relative of the Sac Prairie Saga was Derleth's "Wisconsin Saga", which comprises several historical novels. Detective fiction represented another substantial body of Derleth's work. Most notable among this work was a series of 70 stories in affectionate pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, whose creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he admired greatly. These included one published novel as well (Mr. Fairlie's Journey). The series features a [Sherlock Holmes-styled] British detective named Solar Pons, of Praed Street. The series was highly admired by such notable writers and critics of mystery and detective fiction as Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay), Anthony Boucher, Vincent Starrett, and Howard Haycraft.