Brief Biography of
August Derleth

August Derleth (1909–1971) was a man of many talents. His earliest publications were horror tales that appeared in the celebrated pulp magazine Weird Tales. Through the influence of his longtime correspondent H. P. Lovecraft, Derleth and his friend Donald Wandrei established Arkham House to publish the work of Lovecraft and other masters of weird fiction. He also wrote detective stories, including dozens of stories involving Solar Pons (Derleth’s equivalent of Sherlock Holmes) as well as novels featuring Judge Peck.

But much closer to Derleth’s heart were the many works he wrote about his native Wisconsin. He created a fictitious city, Sac Prairie, loosely based on his own native town of Sauk City and its surrounding area. He generated more than 500 short stories in what came to be called the Sac Prairie Saga, along with ten novels, five short story collections, ten young adult novels, and other miscellaneous prose and poetry. It is this body of work that will chiefly give Derleth his distinguished place in American literature.

The August Derleth Society is proud to make these works available again to the reading public. They reveal the full stature of Derleth as a writer—one who was acutely sensitive to the nuances of character, the heritage of the past, and the swirling nexus of emotions that motivates human action. In spanning more than a hundred years of Wisconsin history, August Derleth’s Sac Prairie Saga tells a universal story of how human beings live and function in a complex world.