[typewriter keys clicking]
- 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.
- Narrator: 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.
[bell ringing] At the St. Aloysius School,
nuns taught him great discipline,
and he became an avid reader
of pulp fiction.
[recording of August Derlerth] - 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.
- Narrator: 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.
[upbeat jazz music]
- Narrator: 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.
[ragtime piano music]
- Narrator: 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.
- Narrator: 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.
[light piano music]
- Narrator: 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.
[typewriter clicking]
- Narrator: 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.
- Narrator: 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] - 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.