Name: DERLETH, William August Aged: 62
Born: February 24, 1909 Where: Sauk City, Wisconsin
Died: July 4, 1971 Where: Sauk City, Wisconsin
Interred: St. Aloysius Cem., Sauk City, Wisconsin
Married: Sandra Evelyn Winters When: April 6, 1953 (div 1959)
Recognition: The British Fantasy Society issues an annual August Derleth Award for Best Novel.

If someone stands you in front of a complete pile of Weird Tales and offers to bet you a $100 that at random you can't pull out an issue that doesn't have an August Derleth short story in it . . . don't take the bet! From beginning to end of that magazine's history, Derleth sold them more short stories (his length of choice) than any other writer in any genre, nearly 150, including his first written at age 15, "Bat's Belfry." Derleth didn't write much science fiction but he edited a great deal of it and liked its writers. His forte was fantasy-horror, which he continued to write up until about the last decade of his life.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin. In 1939, founded Arkham House with Donald Wandrei in Sauk City, Wisconsin. Science fiction and fantasy were parts of the Derleth career, but not the dominant ones. Mystery and horror stories dominated, with a quirky taste for poetry in those areas. And this was the primary focus of Arkham House. Derleth would also complete, publish, and thereby both save and promote the works of H. P. Lovecraft from near oblivion. He encouraged writers with that type of fantastic bent of mind . . . such as Kuttner, Bloch, and Clark Ashton Smith. Derleth's own prolific output of over 100 books would not be eclipsed until Asimov.

"Maybe the illusion of genius must persist for some writers to enable them to create at all. For myself, I have never had it, always recognized it as too costly an illusion to coddle. I never thought of myself as anything but a professional writer whose work could range from pretty good books like Evening in Spring and Country Growth and Village Year to some pretty bad ones like Sweet Genevieve and some of the Judge Peck mysteries. Those Solar Pons stories of mine rank pretty high as pastiches with the readers who like this sort of thing, (while) as stories, they range from quite good to quite bad."

Derleth lived out his very productive life in Sauk City. He was active in his community and state, writing many stories and some books about Wisconsin's historical oddities.

[ED NOTE: Derleth seemed very sympatico with Lovecraft, who lived in Providence, RI, all of his life. Great fantasy writers seem to stay in one place . . . freeing their minds to wander without limit to the ends of their imaginations. Each then able to restore reality (more or less) by a walk outside the house. And too, any drastic change is something a writer seeks to avoid.]

PEN NAMES: Stephen Grendon, Kenyon Holmes, & Tally Mason.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here and a cool 1939 book review.

BIOGRAPHY: Who Was Who in America, Vol 5, p181, World Authors, H.W. Wilson Pub. Co., and Supernatural Fiction Writers, E. F. Bleiler

OBITUARY: The New York Times, Tuesday, June 6, 1971, p36

George C. Willick, 514 East Street, Madison, IN 47250