Bøger af August Derleth

Set in rural Wisconsin in the 1880s, Still Is the Summer Night (1937) is the first of August Derleth's several historical novels in his Sac Prairie saga. We are introduced to the Halder family-old Captain Halder, consumed with memories of his service in the Civil War; the brothers Ratio and Alton, who find themselves in a largely unspoken but intense emotional conflict over Ratio's wife, Julie. As Ratio's increasingly brazen philandering alienates Julie's affections, she naturally inclines toward Alton, who has nurtured a love for her for years. This domestic drama is set amidst the farmlands of Wisconsin, where the eternal verities of the changing seasons and the teeming earth form a quiet backdrop to human struggles that threaten to explode in uncontrollable hatred and violence.

The Shield of the Valiant (1945) is one of the longest novels of the Sac Prairie saga that Derleth ever wrote. Covering the period 1938-41, it is an expansive narrative of the intertwined lives of several key citizens of that small town in Wisconsin: Rena Janney, an attractive teenager who is wooed by Kivden Sewall, to his parents' disapproval; Van Vliet Waterbury, the town's banker, overseeing the financial tribulations of citizens poor and wealthy; Royce Myron, a married man fatally attracted to the wiles of the seductive Megan Hods. Over all hangs the presence of Steve Grendon, now a successful novelist, and in many ways the town's conscience. He criticizes the townsfolk's propensity for malicious gossip, much of it fueled by religious prejudice, while at the same time luxuriating in the natural beauty of the landscape. The wonders and drawbacks of small-town life is keenly etched in this memorable novel.

August Derleth regarded Evening in Spring (1941) as perhaps the best novel he ever wrote. The product of many years' work, the novel began as a novella written as early as 1929, under the title "The Early Years." Derleth wrote successive drafts of this text, showing some of them to his friend H. P. Lovecraft, who commented incisively upon them. Then, around 1940, he wrote the novel as we have it in a few months. This is a poignant tale of young love: Steve Grendon (an obvious stand-in for Derleth himself) becomes infatuated with Margery Estabrook, but both sets of parents object, both because of the couple's youth and also because Steve is Catholic and Margery is Protestant. Will the couple overcome these obstacles, or will they prove too much for these teenagers? Set in the rural Wisconsin landscape that the author paints with as tenderness and affection as he depicts the complex emotions of his protagaonists, Evening in Spring is a testament to the sensitivity of character portrayal that typifies August Derleth's best work.

A journey in time... or a journey into our psyche? This collection of six short stories spanning from the 1890's to to 1950's shows just how various authors have used the vehicle of time travel as a mirror to ourselves. Running away to the past, escaping from the present, avoiding a future, even a print shop manager using time travel to speed up letterpress type setting!Each story a sign of its own time, yet many common threads are revealed in this span of sixty years of science fiction stories. Includes "A Traveler in Time" by August Derleth; "Nine Men in Time" by Noel Loomis; "The Thief of Time" by Capt. S. P. Meek; "The Man from 2071" by Sewell Peaslee Wright; "The Man from Time" by Frank Belknap Long; and the seminal "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells.

The author of this book was a chronicler whose ear was close to the northern Wisconsin ground. In his Sac Prairie Saga, of which ""Walden West"" is the crowning volume, he captures the essences of midwestern village life with his distinctive combination of narrative and prose-poetry.