August Derleth

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August Derleth : biography

February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971

Derleth once wrote of his writing methods, "I write very swiftly, from 750,000 to a million words yearly, very little of it pulp material."

He was married April 6, 1953, to Sandra Evelyn Winters. They divorced six years later. Derleth retained custody of the couple’s two children, April Rose and Walden William. April earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977. She became majority stockholder, President, and CEO of Arkham House in 1994. She remained in that capacity until her death. She was known in the community as a naturalist and humanitarian. April died on March 21, 2011.

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, and is buried in St. Aloysius Cemetery in Sauk City.

Career

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

The Sac Prairie Saga

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 19th century onwards, 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 last 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 library; 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."