Horror Writer and Publisher (1940-44)

...had it not been for the pouring into Arkham House of over $25000 of personal income from my writing over the first ten years, the House could not have survived. I had come to publishing without any previous experience, other than a limited editorial stint with Fawcett Publications... and I had to learn step by step, often painfully, invariably expensively.

          -- August Derleth, "Arkham House: 1939-1969"

The death of H P Lovecraft in 1937 affected Derleth deeply. With the immediate encouragement of friend and fellow Weird Tales contributor Donald Wandrei (1908-87), Derleth put together a collection of Lovecraft's stories, and tried to get them published. There was no interest. Then Derleth had the idea of self-publishing the book -- and Wandrei and Derleth formed Arkham House, their own company dedicated to publishing the fiction and letters of H P Lovecraft. (The name came from Lovecraft's fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts, in and around which many of his best stories were set.)

In 1939 Arkham House published The Outsider and Others, a huge collection containing most of Lovecraft's stories then known to exist. Derleth and Wandrei soon decided that there was much more quality work that could be reprinted in book form and preserved. Arkham House began a regular publishing schedule with its second book in 1941, a collection of some of Derleth's own best horror stories, Someone in the Dark.

Arkham House eventually published just about everything by H P Lovecraft -- fiction, poetry, and nonfiction -- that was worth reading. The publication in five large volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters, edited by Derleth and Wandrei (and James Turner, after Derleth's death) remains an astonishing achievement of scholarship and labour of love.

Although there were several times when its survival seemed in doubt, especially in the 1950's and after Derleth's death, Arkham House is still in business today, operating from its Sauk City warehouse that Derleth had built in the grounds of his own house. Arkham House was and is an internationally recognized publisher of supernatural horror fiction. First book publication by AH was a major step in the careers of such highly-regarded writers as Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E Howard.

As well as maintaining a high output of historical novels, romance novels for women's magazines, short stories, poetry, and a growing amount of journalism, Derleth continued to write horror fiction, mainly for Weird Tales. After Someone in the Dark, many of Derleth's horror stories eventually appeared in a further eleven volumes, ending with the posthumous Harrigan's File (1975) and Dwellers in Darkness (1976).

His single best collection was Mr George and Other Odd Persons (1963) -- ironically published under the name Stephen Grendon (although with a photo of Derleth on the dustjacket!)

As well as publishing H P Lovecraft's own work, Derleth also published many Lovecraft pastiches,  imitative stories that used many of Lovecraft's settings and concepts, although with nothing like the impact of the originals. All too often Derleth simply imitated the more arthritic aspects of HPL's idiosyncratic style, with little apparent understanding of Lovecraft's thought-world.

More controversially, he published several stories that claimed to be "posthumous collaborations" -- notes and story fragments left by Lovecraft that were completed by Derleth. Although these included a full-length novel -- The Lurker at the Threshold (1945) -- the Lovecraft content was in fact very minimal. As was the case with his Lovecraftian pastiches, Derleth sacrificed his usual clarity and readability.

Although Derleth wrote several macabre stories that rank as classics, the vast majority of his output of horror fiction was written to order for magazines that did not pay very much. Such fiction was written quickly, as much for the author's own enjoyment as for anything else. Luckily, readers appreciated the steady supply of reliable entertainment too.

Arkham House undoubtedly helped to promote the post-war growth in the book publication of stories that had only before appeared in magazines. The original magazines were becoming rarer even as new readers heard about the great stories that they had printed, and wanted to read them for themselves.

Derleth was already in on the ground floor. And when publishers started to produce anthologies, he was ready to be a pioneer editor. Starting with Sleep No More (1944) and Who Knocks? (1946), Derleth soon proved to have a sure hand in getting his own selections of classic horror fiction, old and new, into print. Derleth played an important part in making available to a new audience much fine work that would otherwise have remained obscure and neglected. Later anthologies edited for Arkham House itself, such as Over the Edge (1964) and Travellers by Night (1967), contained stories never before published by new and established authors, and have long been regarded as models of their kind.

In the field of science fiction, Derleth's anthologies were not of a uniform high standard, reflecting his shakier knowledge of the genre. While Strange Ports of Call (1948) and The Other Side of the Moon (1949) were excellent selections, later science fiction anthologies sometimes received bad reviews.

In the field of supernatural horror it is the publication record of Arkham House, and Derleth's work as an editor, that remains Derleth's outstanding achievement.