August Derleth
This is a minor masterpiece by a neglected American novelist and essayist who is better known as the editor and advocate of H. P. Lovecraft than for his own work. It is firmly in the tradition of Thoreau’s journals, and simultaneously in that of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, though his beautifully styled evocations of desperate lives don’t have the bitterness that Anderson’s had. Derleth’s feeling for nature, both the human kind and the animals and plant kind, is intense and meticulously observant. His prose is so precise and natural that you don’t hear it as another’s voice, but as your own thought. It’s one of those books that you read with profound pleasure on a quiet night, with an animal snoozing nearby and a single malt at your elbow.
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