Today marks the centennial of August Derleth's birth (February 24, 1909). This icon of early Cthulhu Mythos fiction and small press operations that helped introduce H.P. Lovecraft's works to a wider world has produced a great deal of controversy in the decades following his death in 1971, but has indisputably secured his place in literary history. Derleth, or "Auggie," as he sometimes came to be called by friends and fans of his stories, wrote several cycles of short stories and novella length works like The Trail of Cthulhu, in addition to his own series of Sherlock Holmes-like mysteries based around an investigator named Solar Pons.
It is in Derleth's testy role as Lovecraft's friend, and later as top dog of Arkham House publishing, that he is best remembered. He came into Lovecraft's acquaintance and began a typically voluminous correspondence with HPL during his teenage years. The Providence master of the weird encouraged young Derleth to hone his own abilities in writing weird fiction, and to submit his works to pulp outlets like "Weird Tales." After Lovecraft's death in 1937, Derleth founded Arkham House as a means of publishing the first true collection of Lovecraft's stories, The Outsider and Others, which appeared in 1939. Afterwards, the publisher grew to modest, but notable proportions, and with Derleth at the helm, encouraged and published a large slew of weird writers like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Ramsey Campbell.
Certainly, these basic facts about the life and work of Auggie are well known to anyone with a sense of what became of the fictional trajectory of Lovecraftiana and the weird after HPL's death. It is this same reign as Arkham House master that has led to countless firestorms raging over the motives and meaning of Derleth's hand in Lovecraftian affairs. Today, in fact, it is remarkable that Derleth has survived the torrent of scrutiny and criticism he has come under with a legacy that still contains some brilliant positives. His Cthulhu Mythos fiction--both the tales that appeared solely under his own name and those attached to H.P. Lovecraft's as posthumous "collaborations" (allegedly pieced together with HPL's notes)--has met blistering criticism from scholars like S.T. Joshi and Dirk W. Mosig, who have attacked Derleth's use of Lovecraft's name and his perversion of HPL's indifferent Cosmicism by introducing dualistic struggles between good and evil. Similarly, his management of Arkham House has been a prime issue of contention as well. For years, Derleth and others at the publisher greedily sought to claim sole copyright of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. This has led Derleth critics to level accusations against him of conspiring to monopolize all rights to future publication of Lovecraft's stories as well as Cthulhu Mythos works by other authors.
However, Derleth defenders will point to one glaring facet of Derleth's role in all this: his determined quest to see H.P. Lovecraft's tales in hardcover. Others, like Ramsey Campbell, have also noted the integral role Arkham House played as an outlet for and popularizer of Yog-Sothery. It is difficult to deny that had Derleth and Donald Wandrei not gotten together in the fateful moments after Lovecraft's passing, then HPL's work may have languished in near total obscurity for decades. Moreover, without Arkham House, a refined market with an appetite for the specific types of weird fiction known today may have been stillborn.
One hundred years after his birth, August Derleth continues to be seen as either Angel or Demon in the curious history of Lovecraftiana. Many will seek a more clear portrait of this man's life and effects on some sort of middle ground, between the extremes of Derleth as monster or savior. Perhaps it is best to see him, and judge him, for what he really was: a critical facilitator of modern weird literature in a fledgling stage of development, and one more creative mind inspired by the infinitely long tendril of H.P. Lovecraft's imagination.
-Grim Blogger
On August Derleth's Centennial
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