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Narrator
In 1937, Sauk City author August Derleth published Still is the Summer Night, a novel set in a place he called "Sac Prairie." He signed a contract with Maxwell Perkins in Scribner's, and at that time, Maxwell Perkins was the editor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe. And the assumption was that Derleth was in this stable of important American writers and would eventually become as common a name as Ernest Hemingway. August Derleth was born in 1909, the fourth generation of his family to live in Sauk City. The son and the grandson of blacksmiths, Derleth grew up in a time of horses and dirt roads and an abundance of nature. As a boy, he wandered through the village and the river bottoms, getting to know the people and places that would later appear in his books.
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At the St. Aloysius School, nuns taught him great discipline, and he became an avid reader of pulp fiction.
recording of August Derlerth
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I was reading pulp magazines, a magazine called Secret Service, and a magazine called Weird Tales. And I thought I could do as well-- or let's put it this way, I thought I could do as badly as some of those stories in there, and I proved that I could. He started working on his first public short story when he was 13 years old, Bat's Belfry, and it was published in Weird Tales when he was about 16 years old. And if you read it, it's a terrible short story, but it got in print. And that was the start of his literary career. In high school, Derleth's teachers and the village librarian encouraged him to explore the great works of American literature, like Walden by Henry David Thoreau, whose work would have a continuing influence on Derleth. At the same time, H.P. Lovecraft, a writer of horror fiction for Weird Tales magazine, began a long and steady correspondence with Derleth. Lovecraft corresponded with a lot of writers of Weird Tales and Derleth among them. And he gave uncle-ly advice to Derleth, and, really, in his own way, encouraged Derleth to be a writer of place.
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Derleth attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying under renowned English professor Helen C. White. To pay for school, he churned out horror stories for Weird Tales and other magazines, often in collaboration with his boyhood friend, Mark Schorer, who would go on to lead the English department at the University of California-Berkeley. Graduating at the start of the Great Depression, Derleth took a job in Minneapolis as editor of Mystic Magazine but felt confined by both the job and city life. He just missed being at home, and so when Mystic Magazine folded, he came back to Sauk City and decided that's where he was going to stay and that was going to be the center of his artistic world.
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Moving back into his parents' home, Derleth vowed to do-or-die as a writer. Back in the place he loved, and with the people he knew best, Derleth revived an ambitious plan he conceived in college. He would write the story of his hometown villages in what he called The Sac Prairie Saga. He wanted to tell the story of Sauk City and Prairie du Sac from the time of European settlement into the 1950s. Derleth found a publisher for his first work of the saga, Place of Hawks, which won a national award for short story writing. As his reputation grew, Derleth signed with Scribner's of New York and soon won a prestigious Guggenheim Award to support his work on The Sac Prairie Saga. He wrote diaries of his experiences living in the town. He wrote contemporary histories. Shield of the Valiant is set in the 1940s, and Derleth is a character in the novel. He's being encouraged to become a member of the school board by the town librarian, which is precisely what did happen. And he wrote historical fiction about the early settlers to Sauk City and Prairie du Sac. "And in the stone house they built by the river "there still lived in the fall of 1909, three generations of their descendants." He published Atmosphere of Houses in about 1940, I think. And basically, it's a walk around town, and he's looking at the memory of the people who had lived in those houses. And most of them did not have happy lives. "As Celia ventured "once again into the village "she had so long ago renounced, "she felt herself the focus of a hundred concealed eyes, the focus of the vindictive attention."
Kent Grant
And he'd try and evoke the kind of lives that individuals lived, and the lives of people who were looking for love and were thwarted for one reason or another, and he would try to tell their stories.
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Now making a steady income, Derleth built a house on the outskirts of the village. At the time, Derleth was devastated by the early death of writer H.P. Lovecraft. He and writer Donald Wandrei decided to publish Lovecraft's stories in a book form. But finding no publishing house willing to take it on, they started their own, calling it Arkham House. I think that Derleth really saved Lovecraft, and he would not be as well known if it weren't for Derleth's work.
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To finance his home and the money-losing publishing house, Derleth churned out work at a furious pace. He wrote children's stories and books about Wisconsin history as well as hundreds of articles for a wide variety of magazines. He had to work really hard and publish far more than his publisher, Scribner's, and his editor, Perkins, would want him to publish. While spread thin, Derleth always managed to fit in long walks through the nearby marshes and hills. A lifelong observer of nature, he filled hundreds of small notebooks with ideas for poetry and his most serious work about the place where he lived. He is Wisconsin's most important writer of place, writer about Wisconsin. He was inspired by Thoreau, and that's why he called what many people say is his best book Walden West because he saw Sauk City and Prairie du Sac as his own Walden.
Recording of August Derlerth
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These are character sketches of people I've known or places I've known, and I've known them most of my life. And for that reason, they're important to me and I feel I know them well, and I feel that the lives I've seen lived around me have profound lessons to impart.
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