August William Derleth was born in 1909 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he spent most of his life. He sold his first story to Weird Tales at the age of seventeen, in 1926, and contributed prolifically to that pulp magazine for much of its run. Also in 1926, he came into contact with H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence upon his work would be decisive. Corresponding prolifically with Lovecraft, he became acquainted with many of Lovecraft’s colleagues, including Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, Derleth and Wandrei established the publishing firm of Arkham House to issue Lovecraft’s tales in hardcover; Arkham House would become the most prestigious small-press publisher of supernatural fiction in the United States.

Derleth established a mainstream reputation with such works as Place of Hawks (1935) and Evening in Spring (1941), which richly evoked the history, topography, and personalities of his native Wisconsin. Sinclair Lewis wrote a laudatory article on him in Esquire in 1945. But Derleth failed to become a mainstream author recognized outside his home state, largely because his prodigious literary work in many different fields tended to dissipate his energies. Aside from his publishing activities, he edited several important anthologies of horror and science fiction, notably The Night Side (1944) and Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (1947). He wrote many tales of the Cthulhu Mythos under Lovecraft’s inspiration, although he failed to understand the philosophical direction of Lovecraft’s invention and has been much criticized for leading it in a direction Lovecraft would probably not have approved. Derleth died in Sauk City in 1971.