LIFE

August Wilian Derleth (February 24th, 1909 - July 4th, 1971) was an American author, although he is best known for publishing writings of H.P Lovecraft and starting a publishing company - Arkham House. As an addition he is the one who came up with a name for Lovecraft's creations - Cthulhu Mythos.

He was born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, Derleth started writing his own fiction stories at the age of 13. One of his biggest interests was reading that's why most of his money would go into books, at his young age he would make trips to the library at least 3 times a week. At the age of 16 he got his first short story published in Weird Tales magazine. Next years were spent on studying at University of Wisconsin where he recieved bachelors degree in 1930. Besides studying Derleth would spend those years on writing and polishing his style.

INFLUENCE OF LOVECRAFT

August Derleth would be in correspondence with H.P Lovecraft since his teenage years, which affected the style of his writing as well as introduced him to many themes. Derleth was the one to come up with Cthulhu Mythos term to describe the works of Lovecraft as well as his circle's.

ARKHAM HOUSE

After the death of H.P. Lovecraft Derleth together with his friend Donald Wandrei collected and put together a series of Lovecraft's creations with the intent of publishing them. At the time publishers showed little no to interest in doing so, which forced the two friends to start the Arkham House to fulfill their ideas. The name of the company comes from a fictional city in Lovecraft's universe - Arkham, Massachusetts.

Arkham House published the collection containing most of known Lovecraft's stories, next book that the company published was a selection of short stories by Derleth titled Someone in the Dark

FOLLOWING YEARS

Derleth begun to work of number of stories based on information left by H.P. Lovecraft. Weird Tales published it as a book titled H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth although Derleth's choice to call himself posthumous collaborator made the public question his choice to do so and reacted rather negatively. One of the main issues was that Derleth basically used Lovecraft's name to advertise his own stories.

Even though some might call it immoral, Derleth choices made sure that Lovecraft's creations were not lost to time and even though he did what people at the time found outrageous his abilities and style of writing were not subpar.