Wisconsin Saga (1967-70)

When he was very young, August Derleth had a notion worthy of a giant, and with gigantic industry he has pursued it...

          -- Sinclair Lewis in 1937

The publication in 1958 of The House on the Mound had ended the long spell during which Derleth had published a great deal, but little of note in the Sac Prairie Saga. What was of note had been very notable indeed -- a volume of journal, Village Daybook (1947), a collection of short stories, Sac Prairie People (1948), and The House of Moonlight (1953), a  taut and haunting novella similar in feel to those in his first Sac Prairie Saga book, Place of Hawks. But this was three books out of a total of nearly fifty.

The House on the Mound was a direct sequel to Bright Journey (1940). In the first book, Derleth had fictionalised the first part of the story of Hercules Dousman, a real-life pioneer and entrepreneur of early 19th century Wisconsin. The second novel carried Dousman's rags-to-riches life on, dealing with the building of his mansion at Prairie du Chien (the still extant Villa Louis).

Rather than simply add the new novel to the Sac Prairie Saga, Derleth inaugurated the Wisconsin Saga. He quickly added a third novel, The Hills Stand Watch, mainly set in the lead-mining community of Mineral Point, in 1960.

The Wisconsin Saga novels had a wider setting than just the immediate Sac Prairie region, and took a wider view in dealing with real people and incidents from Wisconsin history. Characters both honest and crooked come and go throughout the series, and sometimes Derleth links them into the earlier Sac Prairie Saga novels as well. The result was a widescreen depiction of an exhilarating and often precarious period in the early history of Wisconsin, livened with plenty of action -- both of the body and the brain.

Easily the best of the Wisconsin Saga, and one of Derleth's best books overall, was The Shadow in the Glass (1963). Set mainly in Cassville and Madison, it chronicles the life of Nelson Dewey, the first Governor of Wisconsin after its Admission to the Union in 1848. It is an in-depth character study of one man and his relationships with those around him, and the events that he shapes as well as those that effect him.

As Dewey arrived alone in Wisconsin as an idealistic and eager young man, over fifty years later he moves towards the end of his life -- once more alone. He began to walk aimlessly through the house, touching things -- the piano, his desk, the table and chairs, his books -- as if he feared that at any moment they would vanish, and Stonefield itself would whisk away in a puff of smoke... He stood there...looking out at the setting moon, a crowd of memories overwhelming him. ...The hollow well of the house gave back the echoes of his voice until it fell away in a whisper. All was still. Outside the whippoorwills began to call, a little wind took rise out of the west, the moon and the promise of the evening vanished under the earth's black rim, and the darkness closed in.

The Wind Leans West (1969) proved to be the last novel in the Wisconsin Saga, and shows, in the growth of Milwaukee, and in the railroads and banks,  the commercial development of what was once frontier territory.

Derleth often unaccountably seemed to enjoy disparaging his own work. Whilst he was always a realist in frankly admitting that only a fraction of his ever-increasing number of books were worthwhile enough ever to survive the test of time, with the Wisconsin saga, Derleth particularly seemed to relish public self-criticism. Certainly Bright Journey and The House on the Mound are often rather wooden and slow-moving, and Derleth's dislike of them is sound judgement. But he sometimes also wrote his own reviews of the Wisconsin Saga novels, and criticised them unmercifully. Clearly this says as much about the author as it does about his work.