The Early Years

Some of August Derleth’s earliest mainstream writing related to a love affair he had with a girl in Sauk City High School, whom he named Margery. The affair ended badly, and Derleth obsessed about it for the rest of his life. In the previously unpublished “The Early Years,” which exists in two drafts dating to 1929 and 1930, he recounted some aspects of this relationship; and in later stories and poems, such as “Good-bye, Margery” and “The Christmas Virgin,” he continued to probe his own feelings of resentment and disappointment over the loss of Margery. But this volume includes another unpublished text, the novella “Marius,” that tells the tale of a gay relationship between two men in high school and college. The exquisitely modulated work is apparently a fantasized version of the friendship Derleth had with Mark Schorer, a fellow student who went on to become a distinguished novelist and critic. These works, along with others that highlight the complex relationship between Derleth, “Margery,” and Schorer, illuminate a side of August Derleth’s life and work that have not been revealed before, and broaden our appreciation of Derleth’s literary gifts.