August William Derleth sold his first story when he was only fifteen. He began corresponding with Lovecraft in August 1926, two years after he had first read ‘The Rats in the Walls’ in Weird Tales.
Author E. Hoffman Price, who had first met Derleth in the early 1950s, recalled that: ‘August was overweight, but no matter how many pounds he lost, his height combined with breadth of frame would make him conspicuous.
‘Square of shoulders: square face; a head of wavy dark hair - amiable eyes and ready smile which would throw the unwary off guard - August was reputed to be irritable, cantankerous, short tempered, and mule stubborn.’
In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, dated October 12, 1926, Lovecraft revealed: ‘I have just discovered a boy of seventeen who promises to develop into something of a fantaisiste. He is August W. Derleth, whose name you may have seen as author of some rather immature stories in Weird Tales. Finding my address through the magazine, he began corresponding with me; & turns out to be a veritable little prodigy; devoted to Dunsany & Arthur Machen, & ambitious to excel in their chosen field.’
Totalling around some 1,000 letters, the correspondence between Lovecraft and his young protégé continued for eleven years, up until a month before the older man’s untimely death.
‘His rationalizations - his beliefs - his attitudes directly and subtly colored my own and helped me to take long strides toward maturity both as a writer and a man,’ Derleth recalled fifty years later.
Teaming up with Minneapolis correspondent Donald Wandrei (and reportedly with some additional input from fellow writer J. Vernon Shea), Derleth started work on putting together a tribute volume to Lovecraft. The result was a huge collection entitled The Outsider and Others, containing thirty-six stories and the influential essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.
As Derleth explained in 1970, the title was chosen ‘because “The Outsider” was not only a favorite Lovecraft tale, but also because Lovecraft himself was rather an outsider in his time.’
However, when two New York publishers rejected the book, one of the editors suggested that Derleth and Wandrei publish it themselves. This they did, creating the Arkham House imprint. ‘There was never any question about the name of our publishing house,’ Derleth later recalled.
Utilising some of the mortgage money Derleth had borrowed from a local bank to build a house, The Outsider and Others was published in 1939 in an edition of 1,268 copies. The dust-jacket illustration was by famed fantasy artist Virgil Finlay. Despite selling the hefty volume for just $5.00 (or $3.50 pre-publication price), Arkham House only received 150 advance orders. Derleth put an advertisement in Weird Tales, but the book moved slowly. It eventually took four years to sell out its only printing and recoup its original investment.
‘In the beginning it took great courage, perseverance, and foresight to get Arkham House established,’ revealed Frank Belknap Long, ‘and both Derleth and Wandrei strained their modest resources to the utmost, making more than one personal sacrifice to ensure that there would be a wide and discriminating audience for HPL’s first short story collection in hardcover.’
To enable the small press to continue, Derleth was forced to publish collections by himself and Clark Ashton Smith to help alleviate the imprint’s cash-flow problems.
‘The buyers of our first book were sufficiently enthusiastic to persuade me to believe there might be a market for small editions of books in the general domain of fantasy, perhaps with emphasis on the macabre or science fiction,’ Derleth explained.
Prior to his death, Lovecraft had named his teenage Florida correspondent Robert Hayward Barlow as his literary executor. ‘Other instructions concerned books to be returned or bequeathed,’ Barlow wrote in 1944. ‘Mrs Gamwell copied out this list in longhand for me, since she wished the original as a sad memento, and her copy I still have. Had I published it then, some misunderstandings and ill-feeling which caused her and me distress, might have been avoided.’
‘He was no more capable of acting as Lovecraft’s literary executor than of commanding an army in battle,’ E. Hoffman Price remembered. ‘Only a man as impractical and unrealistic as H.P. Lovecraft would ever have appointed him to such a position.’
Lovecraft’s ‘boy prodigy’ had wanted to publish his own Lovecraft volume, but Derleth and Wandrei eventually convinced Barlow to hand over all the material to them or to Brown University Library in Providence.
In her 1997 biography, Derleth: Hawk . . . and Dove, Dorothy M. Grobe Litersky revealed that, according to Derleth, Lovecraft’s aunt had ‘signed over any possible profits from the venture, and years later, claimed Mrs Gamwell had willed Lovecraft’s rights to them, also.’
Many Lovecraft fans (as well as authors such as J. Vernon Shea) have questioned Derleth’s version of events over the years, although the aunt certainly left Derleth and Wandrei all royalties, in equal shares, that were owed to her from the first Arkham House collection.
It is apparent that many of Lovecraft’s early stories were in the public domain, having been originally published in uncopyrighted amateur publications. Litersky also noted in her biography of Derleth that, ‘In the case of Lovecraft material, like the individual stories in The Outsider and Others, which were in the public domain, he [Derleth] went right ahead and threatened suit anyway, knowing he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Many authors who wanted permission to publish reprints of Arkham House copyrighted material, paid him more out of a feeling of moral obligation than because they thought he had a legal right to refuse that permission.’
Derleth’s successor at Arkham House, James Turner, maintained in 1990 that ‘Only a qualified attorney could speak authoritatively on the labyrinthine nature of the Lovecraft copyrights.’ However, Turner’s own successor at the imprint, Peter Ruber, claimed a decade later that as a result of a lawsuit filed against the imprint by Donald Wandrei, Arkham’s attorney had ‘removed a considerable amount of documentary evidence’ which contained details of the acquisition of Lovecraft’s literary estate.
This ‘evidence’ apparently included correspondence from the executors of Lovecraft’s aunt’s estate, which assigned the publishing rights to all Lovecraft’s properties to Derleth and Wandrei. In October 1947, Derleth reportedly forwarded notarised copies of these assignments to the editor of Weird Tales.
Whatever the true facts, there is no doubt that Derleth’s almost-obsessive protection of the Lovecraft material eventually resulted in lifting the author’s reputation out of the small press and pulp arenas and into the world of mass- market literature.
As Lin Carter later observed: ‘In 1926, when he casually sent off a friendly reply to a fan letter from a seventeen-year-old reader in Sauk City, Wisconsin, Lovecraft could hardly have guessed that he had made the friend who was in time to make him famous.’
‘Without Derleth there would be no Lovecraft following today,’ echoed Peter Ruber. ‘By the same token, without Lovecraft there would be no Arkham House today. It was a rare and symbiotic relationship of the best kind.’
August Derleth soon became Lovecraft’s chief literary disciple, subsequently inheriting his papers and writing a number of posthumous collaborations based on notes and fragments which Lovecraft had left undeveloped. ‘The Survivor’ was the story closest to completion at the time of the author’s death, but others include ‘The Lamp of Alhazred’ (which features Lovecraft himself as a character), ‘The Shuttered Room’ and the short novel The Lurker at the Threshold (1945).
There is no doubt that Derleth’s influence on the development of the Cthulhu Mythos (a term he himself coined - Lovecraft had never referred to his story cycle by title) was profound. He picked up from where Lovecraft had left it, and developed it into a more coherent, although some might argue more prosaic, whole.
Meanwhile, editor Farnsworth Wright had marked Lovecraft’s passing in the June 1937 issue of Weird Tales with a personal eulogy: ‘Sad indeed is the news that tells us of H.P. Lovecraft’s death. He was a titan of weird
and fantastic literature, whose literary achievements and impeccable craftsmanship were acclaimed throughout the English-speaking world . . . His death is a serious loss to weird and fantastic fiction; but to the editors of Weird Tales the personal loss takes precedence.’
The following month’s issue contained the memorial poem ‘To Howard Phillips Lovecraft’ by Clark Ashton Smith. ‘I am profoundly saddened by the news of H.P. Lovecraft’s death after a month of painful illness,’ Smith wrote in that issue’s letter column, ‘The Eyrie’. ‘The loss seems an intolerable one, and I am sure that it will be felt deeply and permanently by the whole weird fiction public. Most of all will it be felt by the myriad friends who knew Lovecraft through face-to-face meeting or correspondence; for in his case the highest literary genius was allied to the most brilliant and most endearing personal qualities.’
Other tributes to the author from his contemporaries filled out the letter column in the same issue: ‘I just heard the news of H.P. Lovecraft’s recent death,’ wrote Edmond Hamilton. ‘This is quite a shock, coming so soon after the death of [Robert E.] Howard. While I never met either of them, I have been appearing with them in Weird Tales for so long that I had a dim feeling of acquaintance. I think I read every one of Lovecraft’s stories from “Dagon”, years ago. It is too bad that he is gone - there will never be another like him.’
‘I’ve been feeling extremely depressed about Lovecraft’s death,’ echoed Henry Kuttner. ‘Even now I can’t realize it. He was my literary idol since the days of “The Horror at Red Hook”, and lately a personal friend as well. The loss to literature is a very great one, but the loss to HPL’s friends is greater.’
Kenneth Sterling, a young friend whose interplanetary story ‘In the Walls of Eryx’ Lovecraft rewrote and which would be published under a collaborative byline, added his own tribute: ‘A contributor to Weird Tales since its inception, he has always been considered one of the leading writers of modern weird literature and was, in my opinion, the pre-eminent creative artist in this field. His vivid, powerful style, unsurpassed in producing and sustaining a mood of horror is well known to you and your readers. His decease leaves a gap which can never be filled.’
Starting with the July 1937 issue, Weird Tales included something by Lovecraft in seventeen successive issues. These contributions mostly consisted of reprints (sometimes from other magazines), previously rejected tales and poetry.
There were also some ‘new’ stories which carried the Lovecraft byline: ‘The Shunned House’ had initially been rejected by Wright in 1924, and Lovecraft’s friends W. Paul Cook and Robert H. Barlow had both attempted to publish the tale in book form. Cook had printed approximately 250 copies with an introduction by Frank Belknap Long for The Recluse Press back in 1928. Intended to be Lovecraft’s first book, no more than a dozen or so copies were reportedly bound up by Barlow in the mid-1930s, including a leather-bound copy for the author, with the remainder sold for $1.00 apiece.
‘A young friend of Lovecraft’s wanted very much to have the sheets,’ recalled Cook, ‘promising to bind them adequately and send the books out at once. I had my doubts; but Howard seemed to wish to give the boy a chance at the book, so I turned it over to him. That is the last I ever heard from the enterprise, and do not know the fate of the prints.’
It was not until 1959 that Arkham House sold off around 50 sets of the remaining sheets in the unbound state, before binding up the remaining 100 or so copies in its possession and offering them for sale in 1961. A forged photo-offset edition of The Shunned House produced in the mid-1960s also exists.
‘The Wicked Clergyman’ (aka ‘The Evil Clergyman’), a short tale originally written in 1937 as a portion of a letter and never intended for publication, appeared in the April 1939 Weird Tales, while Kenneth Sterling’s science fiction story ‘In the Walls of Eryx’, extensively re-written by Lovecraft back in January 1936, appeared under both names in the October 1939 issue.
Although at least two stories by Lovecraft - one a rewrite featuring Clark Ashton Smith’s toad-god Tsathoggua and the other about a cursed Providence hotel - were both reputedly lost, other ‘stories’ began appearing in various small press magazines. Again, these were often early fragments or extracts from letters, and included ‘The Book’, an unfinished tale started in 1934. Of even more interest was ‘Azathoth’, published in the second and final issue of Robert Barlow’s Leaves (1938). Reputedly the beginning of a never-completed novel that Lovecraft started writing in June 1922, it was the first instance of the eponymous entity being mentioned in the author’s work.
Meanwhile, illness and economics forced Farnsworth Wright to sell control of Weird Tales. Although he stayed on for a brief time as editor, he finally had to relinquish control when the debilitations of Parkinson’s disease took their toll. No longer able to walk without assistance, he died in 1940 as a result of an operation designed to alleviate his condition.
With editorial offices transferred from Chicago to New York, Weird Tales continued under the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith, a middle-aged Scottish woman. Although she never displayed Farnsworth Wright’s talent for editing, McIlwraith bought several Lovecraft stories.
Despite rejecting ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’, in June 1941 McIllwraith decided to take Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, but only if Derleth agreed to cut the 26,000-word story to 15,000 words. It appeared in severely truncated form in the January 1942 issue. In Canada the same issue appeared in May that year, but with different cover and interior artwork due to that country’s wartime import restrictions. Whereas the American edition featured an uncredited painting that had nothing to do with the contents, the Canadian variant used a distinctive depiction of Lovecraft’s ichthyological ‘Deep Ones’ by Edmond Good, thus making it the only issue of Weird Tales in the history of the magazine to feature an illustration for a credited H.P. Lovecraft story on its cover.
August Derleth and Donald Wandrei borrowed a typescript Derleth had prepared some years earlier of Lovecraft’s 48,000-word novella ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (written January-March 1927) from Robert H. Barlow and had it professionally re-typed. The author’s original handwritten manuscript had proved something of a problem, as Derleth recalled in that issue’s ‘The Eyrie’:
‘The story was written in longhand on the reverse side of letters he had received, some 130 or 140 sheets of all sizes and colors. He didn’t believe in margins or ‘white space’. Every sheet was crowded from top to bottom, from left edge to right, with his small, cramped handwriting.
‘That was his original draft; you can imagine what happened when he got through revising, words and sentences crossed out or written in, whole paragraphs added, inserts put on the back of the sheet where they got tangled up with the letters from his correspondents, and the inserts rewritten with additional paragraphs to be put in the insert which was to be put in its proper place in the story.
‘Lovecraft’s handwriting was not easy to read under the best of circumstances; he had his own peculiarities of spelling, often used Latin and Greek phrases, and often used coined words of his own. These made the problem of deciphering his complex puzzle-pages even more difficult. All in all, working after my classes at the U., it took me four months to get through the labyrinth.’
It took two months to prepare and proof a fresh typescript for the story’s abridged appearance under the blurb ‘Last of the Lovecrafts’ in the May and July 1941 issues of Weird Tales. The unexpurgated version was eventually published in Arkham’s second bumper collection of Lovecraft stories, Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943).
After Donald Wandrei joined the US Army in 1942 and was sent to Europe, he left the day-to-day running of Arkham House to August Derleth, except for editing Lovecraft’s voluminous body of letters for future publication. Derleth was considered physically unfit for service because of his high blood pressure.
According to Derleth, he contributed $25,000 from his own income as a writer to keep Arkham House r
unning over the first ten years. Consequently, once paper rationing was over, he began publishing more books by contemporaries of his and Lovecraft’s.
Signing up some of the foremost fantasy and horror authors on both sides of the Atlantic, Arkham produced volumes by Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, A.E. Coppard, Robert Bloch, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Frank Belknap Long, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Robert E. Howard, H. Russell Wakefield, Lady Cynthia Asquith, Ray Bradbury, Carl Jacobi, Fritz Leiber Jr., L.P. Hartley, Lord Dunsany and Seabury Quinn, along with titles by Derleth and Wandrei themselves.
Publication of these and other authors allowed Derleth to keep the Arkham House imprint in the public eye while he prepared more collections of Lovecraft’s work, many of which contained lesser material along with revisions or collaborations. These later Lovecraft volumes included such titles as Marginalia (1944), Something About Cats and Other Pieces (1949), The Survivor and Others (1957), The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), Dreams and Fancies (1962), Collected Poems (1963) and The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966).
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