Walden West

Sac Prairie Saga

by August Derleth

Among the state’s most luminous assets is August Derleth, the internationally famous author of more than 150 books, many celebrating the Midwest and its people. Walden West , reissued here for the first time since its original publication in 1961, is considered by many to be Derleth’s masterpiece.
    Derleth was a chronicler with his ear uniquely attuned to this  northern region. In his Sac Prairie Saga, of which Walden West is the crowning volume, he captures the essences of midwestern village life with his distinctive combination of narrative and prose-poetry.  The book is a seamless series of anecdotes, meditations, character sketches, evocations of the landscape, and celebrations of its human and animal life.  In sections such as “The choir of the frogs,” and “Oh, the smell of the grass,” and “Mrs. Opal Kralz” we meet, in all their small-town particularity, rich symbols of America’s rural origins and experience.  In other sections—“The voices of the wind are endless in their variety” and “If there is one winter voice informed with wildness”—we are treated to the music of the land.  And in others still—”Millie Pohlmann,” “Old Mrs. Block,” “The Buchenau Women”—we sample the inimitable melody the people bring to their places.  In all cases it is a feast.
    Derleth himself called Walden West “an exposition on three related on the persistence of memory; on the sounds and odors of the country; of Thoreau—the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  But one also comes away from these pages with a sense of the comedy and lyricism of the American rural experience, of the rootedness of its people to their land, and of the miraculous, teeming variety of the land itself.  It is a gift to us all that the book is now available again.

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first book publisher of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and for his own contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos and the Cosmic Horror genre, as well as his founding of 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 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

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

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augus...]

Reviews

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walden West, published in 1961, is by general consensus the crowning achievement of the preternaturally prolific (upwards of 150 books published in his lifetime) Wisconsin writer August Derleth (1909-1971). Comprised of sketchbook essays that alternate between swooning nature reveries and depictions of hardscrabble Midwestern lives, Walden West implores us to recognize the world in a grain of sand. Derleth’s microcosm is Sac Prairie, a thinly veiled composite of his Sauk City birthplace and the adjacent village of Prairie du Sac in south central Wisconsin. Throughout his career, he periodically and methodically added to what he called his “Sac Prairie Saga,” which grew to include nearly forty volumes in multiple genres, from literary and historical novels to short stories, poetry, and journals.

Derleth is a conflicted revivalist in Walden West, seeking on the one hand to emulate the immediacy with which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau responded to the natural world, while equally aware that he can’t escape the Freudian lens of twentieth century anxiety. Walden West vividly captures a small-town populace increasingly alienated from nature, yet shadowed by an innate, often unconscious, connection to its rhythms and splendor. Moreover, because of his abiding enthusiasm for the horror fiction of writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)―creator of a dark parallel New England as insular and morbid as Emerson’s and Thoreau’s was open-aired and optimistic―Derleth clearly understands that there is poetry to be found in even the darkest night of the soul.

The Concord-bred Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau was never a systematic or fully articulated philosophy. Rather, it was a radical ideology of personal revelation meant to be experienced (and expressed) individual by individual; a democratizing and in the same breath an enshrinement of human consciousness and its capacity for insight and ecstasy. An innately American philosophy, in other words, presumptuously universal one moment, awkwardly personal the next. August Derleth works from a similar palette, while at the same time darkening the hues and adding shadows to paths that once seemed horizonless and flooded with light.

[Maurissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who spent formative years in Sauk Prairie I feel like I should say that there are more than JUST sad, lonely people there who die alone.

There are lots of birds, he got that right.

[Jc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was surprised by this book. It has been on my “must read list” since the 1980s, long before I lived in the region Derleth wrote about. I had always been expecting it to be a portrait of an Upper-Midwest Thoreauvian world, with lots of musings about ponds, cabins, and self-reliance (maybe including some shopping lists). I was not expecting a Wisconsin version of a Our Town/Spoon River anthology, complete with a dark undertone. While the ponds, birds, frogs, and self-reliance (of a sort) are all there to be found, this is more a collection of stories of the effects of isolation and loneliness on the lives of everyday people. Both very dark and full of life, this is a book that needs to be better known for what it is than for the innocent, contemplative implications of its title. A very American masterpiece; W.West is a portrait of an America which is at the same time wonderful, hopeful, poignant, and darkly disturbing; probably more typical of real life that one might hope. Often spoken of as showing a positive “capturing of midwestern village life,” that life as portrayed here is not necessarily a good thing. As Derleth himself described it, Walden West demonstrates how “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

[Lynne]

Beautiful writing...reminds me of Wendell Berry's Port William series and many of Philip Gulley's remembrances...

[Rick Bie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunningly artful use of language in character studies that are piercing, insightful, and largely bleak. I found this to be a difficult read despite really admiring Derleth's renowned skill at word craft. Perhaps most frustrating was that there's no progression to the narrative, as if it were stuck in neutral. And maybe that's the point.

[John Nondorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some excellent nature writing and compelling character sketches. Having been published in 1961, it's unsurprising, but still disappointing, to read a couple racist depictions.