Doors Into a Wider World (1925-31)

There is in every life the right time for enlightenment, for exposure to the life of the mind, for a door to be opened into that wider world that unfolds from one's own doorstep...

          -- Walden West

In high school Derleth encountered two classic American authors who remained influences throughout his life: Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82).

Many of Emerson's Essays, especially "Self-Reliance" and "Nature" seemed to have been written with a growing self-awareness and talent like Derleth's in mind. Emerson's resounding declarations that There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion and A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds were met with deep agreement.

Thoreau's Walden came to provide Derleth with a sort of Bible -- not one to be preached from, but one to be kept in the recesses of my mind, not so much thought of as lived. Thoreau's compression of the world, of the universe, into Walden confirmed Derleth's growing sense that the microcosm of Sac Prairie was one which reflected the macrocosm of the world. Thoreau's It is life near the bone where it is sweetest encouraged Derleth to make its pursuit determine the course of future decades.

So in high school Derleth also had the other main formative experience of his life: he fell in love for the first time. The autobiographical novel Evening in Spring (1941) later captured perfectly the ageless dream of first love, and, even more so, the emotions that followed its end. When Margery finally gives into parental pressure to go out with another boy, Steve feels that time and the weakness of her had combined to defeat me, to tear away this beautiful unalloyed first love, to despoil the crystal of love, to plunder the unwary heart. ...the hurt pushed up again, the terrifying loneliness, unreasoning, painful, with a blind onrushing that stung and smarted.

Once again, experiences and lessons learned in adolescence would remain with Derleth for the rest of his life, and provide material for some of his most perceptive and heartfelt work.

Derleth's formal education continued at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. He earned a BA studying English Literature, and completed his thesis on "The Weird Tale in English Since 1890". (Derleth's thesis was derivative, with its heavy reliance on his mentor H P Lovecraft's ground-breaking essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". But it showed where his main interests lay, and would increasingly lie towards the end of the decade.)