The Huge Newness of the Scene (1937 - 39)

years,
years --
a score -- more now:
a child's year, a father's age, and now
a hundred years, a century, since man and oxen-cart,
     since man and ox and plow
minutely came in the huge newness of the scene
which spring did deck, the winter glean...

          -- "Ode to the Sac Prairie Dead"

In 1935 Derleth published Place of Hawks, a collection of four novellas which was his first "serious" book, and also the first volume in what became his life's achievement, the Sac Prairie Saga. The Saga was soon conceived as being the chronicle of the history and people of Wisconsin, from the early pioneers of the beginning of the nineteenth century, through to the 1950's. Eventually the Saga came to consist of nearly 40 volumes: novels, collections, journals, poetry, and autobiography.

The stories in Place of Hawks are narrated by Derleth's alter-ego character Steve Grendon, and are long, moody evocations of the darker side of life in Sac Prairie as seen through the eyes of an adolescent. Steve narrates many other short stories eventually included in the Saga, as well as the novel Evening in Spring.

Taking the Sac Prairie novels in the order of their setting, the arrival of the first settlers, the defeat of the last of the Sauk Indians, and the founding of the town is told in Wind Over Wisconsin (1938) and Restless Is the River (1939).

Shadow of Night (1943) is a taut, dark psychological novel set in the growing Sac Prairie community of the 1850's, not long before the Civil War. Derleth's first "serious" novel, Still Is the Summer Night (1937) takes the town of the 1880's as the backdrop for the violent emotional, moral, and physical conflicts of a love triangle.

The deceptively peaceful town is rapidly coming into the twentieth century in Sweet Genevieve (1942) -- a sugary romance that should have been published in a woman's magazine first, and then left there!

Steve Grendon appears as a fifteen year-old truly falling in love for the first -- and possibly penultimate -- time in Evening in Spring (1941). He reappears some fifteen years later as an outwardly successful writer in The Shield of the Valiant (1945) -- a huge kaleidoscopic novel of life, love, and discord in the Sac Prairie in the years immediately before Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II.

With the publication of the earliest Sac Prairie Saga volumes, Derleth achieved critical acclaim, and won a $2500 Guggenheim Fellowship. Among his sponsors was Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), the first United States author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. (Rather than spending the money on travel, as the award was intended for, Derleth used his prize to pay for the binding of his huge collection of newspaper comic pages...)

In commenting on the Saga, Lewis also put his finger on both Derleth's faults and virtues as a writer: It is proof of Mr Derleth's merit that he makes one want to make the journey to see his particular Avalon: the Wisconsin River shining among its islands....if August Derleth could ever, by some unusually strong magic, be persuaded that he isn't half as good as he thinks he is, if he would learn the art of sitting still and using a blue pencil, he might become twice as good as he thinks he is -- which would rank him with Homer.

Derleth collected short stories and novellas belonging to the Saga in Country Growth, Sac Prairie People, and Wisconsin in Their Bones. In particular, the long-running series of stories featuring the hilarious misadventures of the oddball farmer Gus Elker provide the teenage Steve Grendon with relief from his usual introspection and exposure to Sac Prairie's less balanced inhabitants.

A number of Saga novels and short stories were never published in book form, or collected (or never published at all) during Derleth's lifetime. As part of an ongoing publishing programme, Country Matters (1996) collected all of the Gus Elker stories, and Return to Sac Prairie (1996) includes Linda Frayne, a novel never before published in book form.

There is nothing quite like the Sac Prairie Saga in American Literature. The historical sweep and variety of moods in its fiction, together with the detailed observations, recollections, and reflections in its poetry and volumes of Derleth's gigantic journal, made his own comparison of his Saga with Balzac's Human Comedy an appropriate one.

Derleth's character Thorne Farway (in "Farway House") surely spoke for Derleth himself: Every spring to watch the earth grow green, to see the birds come back again, to feel the sky become a softer blue, to breathe new life with every breath...every winter to look out upon the fields and rolling hills...to mark the drear, grey days with trivial details of living here -- sweet, sweet living. That's my life. I want nothing more. I write. How could I keep from writing?