Donald Wandrei

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Donald Albert Wandrei (born April 20, 1908 in Saint Paul , Minnesota , † October 15, 1987 ibid) was an American author of sci-fi , fantasy and horror literature as well as poet and editor. His younger brother was the artist, illustrator, and science fiction writer Howard Wandrei .

Youth, studies, literature

Donald Wandrei was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His grandparents were among the first to settle there. Donald's father, Albert Christian Wandrei, was the chief editor of the West Publishing Company, America's premier law book publisher. Donald grew up in his parents' house at 1152 Portland Ave, St Paul, where he spent most of his life - apart from serving in the Army and occasional visits to New York and Hollywood. He made regular walks through the woods on the Minnesota River; later he taught August Derleth, among others , the fine art of finding morel .

While he attended Central High School in Saint Paul from 1921 to 1924, he wrote articles for the school newspaper and was an avid reader of Science and Invention magazine . From 1923 he worked part-time as a library assistant in the Saint Paul Public Library; he was also an evening assistant at the Hill Reference Library in 1923 and 1924. This gave him access to an almost unlimited variety of literature. In 1928 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Minnesota , where he co-edited the student newspaper The Minnesota Daily . The novel The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Make , whom Wandreis' pen pal HP Lovecraft held in high esteem , had an enormous influence on him at this time .

Friendship with Lovecraft among others

Wandrei began to write ambitiously in 1926, and from around 1932 he wrote full-time. At the end of 1927 he hitchhiked from Minnesota to Rhode Island to visit his friend HP Lovecraft, who then took him on several nostalgia tours - through Providence , Boston , Salem and Marblehead . There was also the infamous excursion to Warren described by Wandrei in Marginalia (published by Arkham House in 1944). Wandrei, Lovecraft and James Ferdinand Morton each tested 28 different ice cream flavors in Maxfield's Ice Cream Parlor.

Wandrei wrote for Pulp magazines until the late 1930s . As a friend and protégé of Lovecrafts, he was a member of the Lovecraft circle - as were Frank Belknap Long , Clark Ashton Smith , Robert H. Barlow , Henry S. Whitehead , August Derleth , Forrest J Ackerman , Robert Bloch , Robert E. Howard and others Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales magazine threatened Wandrei in an ultimatum that the Lovecraft circle would no longer be published by him if he did not publish Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu . Wandrei contributed two stories to the Cthulhu myth : The Fire Vampires (1933) and The Tree-Men of M'Bwa (1933).

Poetry and Pulp Fiction

Wandrei was the first lyric poet to publish a series of sonnets in Weird Tales : Sonnets of the Midnight Hours . Lovecraft found this so good that he started his own lyric series Fungi From Yuggoth . Lovecraft's friend Robert E. Howard also wrote a corresponding series with Sonnet's out of Bedlam .

With Dead Titans, Waken! Wandrei completed his only novel-length fantasy story in 1932, which, however, was rigorously rejected by three publishers - Harpers, Kendall and John Day. It wasn't until 1948 that Arkham House was supposed to bring out a heavily revised version called The Web of Easter Island . ST Joshi wanted to publish the original at Fedogan & Bremer in the late 1990s, but that never happened. Until 2012, the US publisher Centipede Press published the book along with wall rice narrative Invisible Sun .

In 1933, Wandrei lived in New York near Street & Smith, the publishing house of Astounding Stories , so that he could personally bring in new texts. B. Colossus , the first thought variant story (a story about completely new or unexplored ideas such as the time travel paradox or foreign dimensions). With this, Wandrei succeeded in reviving the somewhat unpopular astounding genre under his publisher's mentor F. Orlin Tremaine. Von Wandrei has published 16 stories in Astounding Stories , 14 in Weird Tales and various others in other magazines such as Esquire . In the 1930s, Wandrei also wrote several non-fantastic short stories and some plays, including a collaboration with his brother Howard, but none of them interested publishers or agents.

Arkham House Publishing House

Wandrei founded Arkham House with August Derleth in 1939 to revive Lovecraft's literary legacy - a project that made Wandrei better known than his own works. A large part of the editing of Lovecraft's Selected Letters , as they appeared in five volumes at Arkham House, was done by Wandrei.

He also wrote texts for Gang Busters and other comic series in the 1940s; he also wrote song lyrics in Hollywood . After the Second World War he wrote speculative fiction stories again , some of which were used in the comic series Weird Science . B. A Scientist Divides in Volume 6 ( Divide and Conquer ) and A Monster From Nowhere in Volume 7 ( Monster From the Fourth Dimension ).

In the 1970s, Wandrei felt that he was being treated unfairly and launched a lengthy copyright and financial litigation against Arkham House, a publisher he co-founded. At a congress in 1976 Wandrei met the publisher Philip Rahman and both became friends; three years after Wandreis death in 1987, Rahman and his partner Dennis Weiler founded the publishing house Fedogan & Bremer to publish works by Donald and Howard Wandrei as well as by other classic pulp authors.

Honors

bibliography

Poetry

  • Ecstasy & Other Poems , The Recluse Press, Althol (MA) 1928. - Limited edition (322 pieces).
  • Dark Odyssey , Webb Publishing, Salem (OR) 1931. - Limited edition (400 copies), with five illustrations by Howard Wandrei .
  • Poems for Midnight , Arkham House , Sauk City (WI) 1964.
  • Collected Poems , Necronomicon Press , West Warwick (RI) 1988.-Ed. v. ST Joshi, illustr. v. Howard Wandrei , OCLC 21630466 .
  • Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poetry and Prose-Poems of Donald Wandrei , Hippocampus Press, New York (NY) 2008.-Ed. v. ST Joshi, illustr. v. Howard Wandrei , ISBN 0-9771734-9-6 .

prose

  • The Eye and the Finger , Arkham House , Sauk City (WI) 1944.
  • The Web of Easter Island , Arkham House , Sauk City (WI) 1948.
  • Strange Harvest , Arkham House , Sauk City (WI) 1965.
  • Colossus (ed. Philip J Rahman & Dennis E Weiler), Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis (MN) 1989, ISBN 1-878252-00-3 . - An extended 2nd edition appeared in 1999 with the encores A Stranger Passes u. If , plus photo gallery u. updated introduction by Richard L. Tierney, ISBN 1-878252-45-3 .
  • Don't Dream: The Collected Fantasy and Horror of Donald Wandrei (ed.Philip J Rahman & Dennis E Weiler), Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis (MN) 1997, ISBN 1-878252-27-5 .
  • Frost , Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis (MN) 2000, ISBN 1-878252-42-9 .
  • Three Mysteries , Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis (MN) 2000, OCLC 51309341 .

Letters

  • Mysteries of Time & Spirit: The Letters of HP Lovecraft & Donald Wandrei (ed. ST Joshi & David E Schultz), Night Shade Books, San Francisco (CA) 2002, ISBN 1-892389-49-5 .

Secondary literature

  • Leigh Blackmore: Ecstasies and Odysseys: The Weird Poetry of Donald Wandrei. In: Phillip A. Ellis, Benjamin J. Szumskyj (Eds.): Rhythmic Toil Combin'd: Poets of the Lovecraft Circle. Mythos Books, New York (NY) 2007.
  • Phillip A. Ellis: A Concordance to the Poetry of Donald Wandrei. Hippocampus Press, New York (NY) 2008, ISBN 978-0-9814888-2-0 . - Free: PDF
  • Don Herron: Collecting Donald Wandrei. In: Firsts (Oct. 1999), o. V., o. O. 1999. - Free: HTML .
  • ST Joshi: Donald Wandrei: Nightmare in Green. In: Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry (chap. 5), P'rea Press, Sidney 2008, ISBN 978-0-9804625-3-1 u. ISBN 978-0-9804625-4-8 .
  • Richard L. Tierney: Introduction. In: Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. Fedogan & Bremer, Minneapolis (MN) 1999 (2nd ed.).

Web links

Individual proof

  1. ↑ WFA 1984
personal data
SURNAME Wandrei, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wandrei, Donald Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fiction, as well as poet and editor
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Paul , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1987
Place of death Saint Paul , Minnesota