August is for August Derleth
August Derleth (1909-1971) published his first short story, Bat’s Belfry, in 1926, and published more than a hundred books and 150 short stories in his lifetime. He claimed that he could pump out up to a million words a year (“very little of it pulp material”).
But Derleth wasn’t just a writer; he was a ferociously energetic man, who taught American literature, sat on his local school board, served as a parole officer, organised a men’s club, was the literary editor of the Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, for twenty years, and somehow also made time to fence, swim, collect stamps and comic books, and hike. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship (which he used to bind his comic collection) and became the president of the 6th World Science Fiction Convention in 1948. (The Glasgow Worldcon, which was held earlier this month, was the 82nd.)
Derleth famously founded the publisher Arkham House in 1939, alongside Donald Wandrei, specifically to publish the works of HP Lovecraft. Lovecraft, who died in 1937, had previously only been published in pulp magazines and never collected or published in a format intended to last. Arkham House’s publications are particularly notable for the quality of their paper, printing and binding, and not only preserved Lovecraft’s legacy – they essentially created it.
Indeed, Arkham House’s name was inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional city of Arkham – many people know it best today as the famous asylum housing the Joker, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, and a host of other Batman villains… on and off, depending on their escape plans. Derleth ensured that Lovecraft’s works were preserved for posterity; problematic though Lovecraft may be, his relatively small body of work has had a profound impact on both horror as a genre and American writing in general. Derleth’s own horror writing is no less important to the cannon; not only did he expand on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, he wrote a great deal of horror which continues to be reprinted and enjoyed fifty-some years after his death. To get a taste of his Lovecraft stories, try “The Lamp of Alhazred” and “The Shuttered Room.” For a taste of Derleth’s non-Lovecraft writing, you can’t go wrong with the Solar Pons stories
That’s all for now!
Anne
Publishing Director, Arcadia Books
