August Derleth

August Derleth
Derleth in 1939
Born	August William Derleth February 24, 1909 Sauk City, Wisconsin, US
Died	July 4, 1971(1971-07-04) (aged 62) Sauk City, Wisconsin, US
Pen name	Stephen Grendon[1]
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Genre	Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Regional, Science fiction
Literary movement	Weird Fiction
Spouse	Sandra Winters ​ ​ (m. 1953; div. 1959)​
Children	2

August William Derleth (February 24, 1909 – July 4, 1971) was an American writer and anthologist. He was the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. He made contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the cosmic horror genre and helped found the publisher Arkham House (which did much to bring supernatural fiction into print in hardcover in the US that had only been readily available in the UK). Derleth was also a leading American regional writer of his day, as well as prolific in several other genres, including historical fiction, poetry, detective fiction, science fiction, and biography. Notably, he created the fictional detective Solar Pons, a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

A 1938 Guggenheim Fellow, Derleth considered his most serious work to be the ambitious Sac Prairie Saga, a series of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and non-fiction naturalist works designed to memorialize life in the Wisconsin he knew. Derleth can also be considered a pioneering naturalist and conservationist in his writing.^[2]