Editing August Derleth (section)

===The ''Sac Prairie Saga''===
Derleth wrote an expansive series of novels, short stories, journals, poems, and other works about [[Sauk Prairie, Wisconsin|Sac Prairie]]. Derleth intended this series to comprise up to 50 novels telling the projected life-story of the region from the 19th century onwards, with analogies to [[Balzac]]'s ''[[La Comédie humaine|Human Comedy]]'' and [[Proust]]'s ''[[Remembrance of Things Past]]''.

This, and other early work by Derleth, made him a well-known figure among the regional literary figures of his time: early [[Pulitzer Prize]] winners [[Hamlin Garland]] and [[Zona Gale]], as well as Sinclair Lewis, the last both an admirer and critic of Derleth.

As Edward Wagenknecht wrote in ''Cavalcade of the American Novel'', "What Mr. Derleth has that is lacking… in modern novelists generally, is a country. He belongs. He writes of a land and a people that are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In his fictional world, there is a unity much deeper and more fundamental than anything that can be conferred by an ideology. It is clear, too, that he did not get the best, and most fictionally useful, part of his background material from research in the library; like Scott, in his Border novels, he gives, rather, the impression of having drunk it in with his mother's milk."

Jim Stephens, editor of ''An August Derleth Reader'', (1992), argues: "what Derleth accomplished… was to gather a Wisconsin mythos which gave respect to the ancient fundament of our contemporary life."

The author inaugurated the ''Sac Prairie Saga'' with four novellas comprising ''Place of Hawks'', published by Loring & Mussey in 1935. At publication, ''[[The Detroit News]]'' wrote: "Certainly with this book Mr. Derleth may be added to the American writers of distinction."<ref>{{cite book| last = Wandrei| first = Donald| title = 100 books by August Derleth| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=c6ENAQAAIAAJ| access-date = February 14, 2011| year = 1962| publisher = [[Arkham House]]| page = 115| archive-date = April 25, 2022| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20220425121132/https://books.google.com/books?id=c6ENAQAAIAAJ| url-status = live}}</ref>

Derleth's first novel, ''Still is the Summer Night'', was published two years later by the famous [[Charles Scribner's Sons|Charles Scribners']] editor [[Maxwell Perkins]], and was the second in his Sac Prairie Saga.

''Village Year'', the first in a series of journals – meditations on nature, Midwestern village American life, and more – was published in 1941 to praise from ''[[The New York Times Book Review]]'': "A book of instant sensitive responsiveness… recreates its scene with acuteness and beauty, and makes an unusual contribution to the Americana of the present day." The ''[[New York Herald Tribune]]'' observed that "Derleth… deepens the value of his village setting by presenting in full the enduring natural background; with the people projected against this, the writing comes to have the quality of an old Flemish picture, humanity lively and amusing and loveable in the foreground and nature magnificent beyond." James Grey, writing in the ''[[St. Louis Dispatch]]'' concluded, "Derleth has achieved a kind of prose equivalent of the ''Spoon River Anthology''."

In the same year, ''Evening in Spring'' was published by Charles Scribners & Sons. This work Derleth considered among his finest. What ''[[The Milwaukee Journal]]'' called "this beautiful little love story", is an autobiographical novel of first love beset by small-town religious bigotry. The work received critical praise: ''[[The New Yorker]]'' considered it a story told "with tenderness and charm", while the ''Chicago Tribune'' concluded: "It's as though he turned back the pages of an old diary and told, with rekindled emotion, of the pangs of pain and the sharp, clear sweetness of a boy's first love." Helen Constance White, wrote in ''The Capital Times'' that it was "… the best articulated, the most fully disciplined of his stories."

These were followed in 1943 with ''Shadow of Night'', a Scribners' novel of which ''[[The Chicago Sun]]'' wrote: "Structurally it has the perfection of a carved jewel…. A [[psychological novel]] of the first order, and an adventure tale that is unique and inspiriting."

In November 1945, however, Derleth's work was attacked by his one-time admirer and mentor, Sinclair Lewis. Writing in ''[[Esquire (magazine)|Esquire]]'', Lewis observed, "It is a proof of Mr. Derleth's merit that he makes one want to make the journey and see his particular Avalon: The [[Wisconsin River]] shining among its islands, and the castles of Baron Pierneau and Hercules Dousman. He is a champion and a justification of regionalism. Yet he is also a burly, bounding, bustling, self-confident, opinionated, and highly-sweatered young man with faults so grievous that a melancholy perusal of them may be of more value to apprentices than a study of his serious virtues. If he could ever be persuaded that he isn't half as good as he thinks he is, if he would learn the art of sitting still and using a blue pencil, he might become twice as good as he thinks he is – which would about rank him with Homer." Derleth good-humoredly reprinted the criticism along with a photograph of himself sans sweater, on the back cover of his 1948 country journal: ''Village Daybook''.

A lighter side to the ''Sac Prairie Saga'' is a series of quasi-autobiographical short stories known as the "Gus Elker Stories", amusing tales of country life that [[Peter Ruber]], Derleth's last editor, said were "… models of construction and… fused with some of the most memorable characters in American literature." Most were written between 1934 and the late 1940s, though the last, "Tail of the Dog", was published in 1959 and won the ''Scholastic Magazine'' short story award for the year. The series was collected and republished in ''Country Matters'' in 1996.

''Walden West'', published in 1961, is considered by many Derleth's finest work. This prose meditation is built out of the same fundamental material as the series of Sac Prairie journals, but is organized around three themes: "the persistence of memory… the sounds and odors of the country… and Thoreau's observation that the 'mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.{{'"}} A blend of nature writing, philosophic musings, and careful observation of the people and place of "Sac Prairie". Of this work, George Vukelich, author of "North Country Notebook", writes: "Derleth's ''Walden West'' is… the equal of Sherwood Anderson's ''Winesburg,Ohio'', Thornton Wilder's ''Our Town'', and Edgar Lee Masters' ''Spoon River Anthology''." This was followed eight years later by ''Return to Walden West'', a work of similar quality, but with a more noticeable environmentalist edge to the writing, notes critic [[Norbert Blei]].

A close literary relative of the ''Sac Prairie Saga'' was Derleth's ''Wisconsin Saga'', which comprises several historical novels.