A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

As early as April 1927 Lovecraft already had a vague idea of expanding ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ for a putative second edition, and Cook occasionally mentioned the possibility of issuing such an edition separately as a monograph. Lovecraft set up a section in his commonplace book entitled ‘Books to mention in new edition of weird article’, listing several works he read in the subsequent months and years; but Cook’s physical and financial collapse confounded, or at least delayed, the plans, and the second edition did not materialize until 1933, and in a form very different from what Lovecraft envisioned.

Lovecraft, having by 1927 already published nearly a score of tales in Weird Tales, and finding that amateur work was at a virtual end with the demise of the UAPA, now began gathering colleagues specifically devoted to weird fiction. The last decade of his life would see him become a friend, correspondent, and mentor of more than a dozen writers who would follow in his footsteps and become well known in the fields of weird, mystery, and science fiction.

August Derleth (1909–71) wrote to Lovecraft through Weird Tales

, and the latter replied in August 1926. From that time on, the two men kept up a very steady correspondence—usually once a week—for the next ten and a half years. Derleth had just finished high school in Sauk City, Wisconsin, and in the fall of 1926 would begin attendance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. As a fiction writer he would reveal astounding range and precocity. Although his first story in Weird Tales dates to his eighteenth year, his weird tales—whether written by himself or in collaboration with the young Mark Schorer—would be in many ways the least interesting aspect of his work; they are conventional, relatively unoriginal, and largely undistinguished, and he readily admitted to Lovecraft that they were written merely to supply cash for his more serious work. That serious work—for which Derleth would eventually gain considerable renown, and which today remains the most significant branch of his output—is a series of regional sagas drawing upon his native Wisconsin and written in a poignant, Proustian, reminiscent vein whose simple elegance allows for evocative character portrayal. The first of these works to be published was

Place of Hawks (1935), although Derleth was working as early as 1929 on a novel he initially titled The Early Years

, which was finally published in 1941 as Evening in Spring. Those who fail to read these two works, along with their many successors in Derleth’s long and fertile career, will have no conception why Lovecraft, as early as 1930, wrote with such enthusiasm about his younger colleague and disciple.

Donald Wandrei (1908–87) got in touch with Lovecraft through Clark Ashton Smith in late 1926, shortly after he had entered the University of Minnesota. Smith was the first writer to whom Wandrei was devoted, and in many ways he remained Wandrei’s model in both fiction and poetry. Wandrei was initially attracted to poetry, but he was also experimenting with prose fiction. Some of this early work is quite striking, especially ‘The Red Brain’ (Weird Tales, October 1927). It, along with several other works such as the celebrated ‘Colossus’ (Astounding Stories, January 1934), reveals a staggeringly cosmic imagination second only to Lovecraft’s in intensity. Like Derleth, who spent nearly the whole of his life in and around Sauk City, Wisconsin, Wandrei lived almost his entire life in his family home in St Paul, Minnesota, save for various periods in New York in the 1920s and 1930s; but unlike the cheerful Derleth, Wandrei had a brooding and misanthropic streak that often intrigued Lovecraft and may perhaps have helped to shape his own later philosophical views.