Wandrei, Donald
Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1908-1987) US editor and author, founder with August Derleth in 1939 of Arkham House, which they formed initially to publish the work of H P Lovecraft, whom both admired deeply. Wandrei resigned his interest in the firm after World War Two – when he also stopped writing new fiction, though much has been published for the first time in recent years – and after Derleth's death in 1971 he declined to resume it. As a writer he was justifiably best known for his Fantasy and weird stories, beginning with "The Red Brain" (October 1927 Weird Tales), a tale that incorporates a bungled sf premise about the nature of matter into a narrative whose deepest effect is one of chill horror at the cosmos or vastation (see Horror in SF). Later sf work, much of it in Astounding in the 1930s, is similarly compounded of disparate ingredients, and the tales assembled in the posthumous Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (coll 1989) and Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei (coll 1989) share the sense of the grotesqueness of the world espoused in that first story. Oddly, Fantasy Magazine solicited him to contribute to the sf Round-Robin tale, "The Challenge from Beyond", for its September 1935 issue, rather than the identically titled weird fantasy that was published simultaneously; his collaborators were Murray Leinster, E E Smith, Harl Vincent and Stanley G Weinbaum. In addition to some unremarkable verse, gathered in Ecstasy and Other Poems (coll 1928 chap), Dark Odyssey (coll 1931 chap) and Poems for Midnight (coll 1965), he published a collection of fantasy, The Eye and the Finger (coll 1944), a Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos tale, The Web of Easter Island (1948) – probably his finest single fiction, making, as usual his work, opportunistic use of sf devices (in this case travel between the Dimensions) to colour the horror – and Strange Harvest (coll 1965). With Derleth he selected the contents of the first Arkham House Lovecraft collections and edited three volumes of Lovecraft's Selected Letters: 1911-1924 (coll 1965), 1925-1929 (coll 1968), and 1929-1931 (coll 1971).
Wandrei's brother, Howard Wandrei (1909-1956), was an illustrator and the author of some fantasy stories under his own name and as by Robert Coley and H W Guernsey; Time Burial (coll 1995) assembles most of his best work. [JC]
see also: Astounding Science-Fiction; Cosmology; End of the World; Great and Small; Parallel Worlds; Small Presses and Limited Editions; Thought-Variant.
Donald Albert Wandrei
born St Paul, Minnesota: 20 April 1908
died Mendota Heights, Minnesota: 15 October 1987
works
- The Web of Easter Island (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1948) [hb/Audrey Johnson]
collections
- Ecstasy and Other Poems (Athol, Massachusetts: Recluse Press, 1928) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Dark Odyssey (St Paul, Minnesota: Webb Publishing, 1931) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/]
- The Eye and the Finger (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1944) [coll: hb/Howard Wandrei]
- Poems for Midnight (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/Frank Utpatel]
- Strange Harvest (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965) [coll: hb/Howard Wandrei]
- The Collected Poems of Donald Wandrei (West Warwick, Rhode Island: Necronomicon Press, 1988) [poetry: coll: chap: pb/Howard Wandrei]
- Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fedogan and Bremer, 1989) [coll: hb/Jon Arfstrom]
- Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fedogan and Bremer, 1999) [coll: exp of the above: two stories and other material added: hb/Jon Arfstrom]
- Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy of Donald Wandrei (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fedogan and Bremer, 1989) [coll: hb/Harold Hughesdon]
- Frost (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fedogan and Bremer, 2000) [coll: hb/Les Edwards]
- A Donald Wandrei Miscellany (St Paul, Minnesota: Sidecar Preservation Society, 2001) [coll: chap: edited by D H Olson: pb/Roger Gerberding]
- Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poems and Prose Poems of Donald Wandrei (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008) [poetry: coll: edited by S T Joshi: illus/pb/Howard Wandrei]
- Raiders of the Universes (no place given: Project Gutenberg, 2009) [novelette: ebook: first appeared September 1932 Astounding: na/]
- Dead Titans, Waken!/Invisible Sun (Centipede Press, 2012) [coll: containing the two named book-length stories: edited by S T Joshi: hb/Jon Armstrom]
- The Complete Ivy Frost (Royal Oak, Michigan: Haffner Press, 2021) [coll: hb/]
nonfiction
- Mysteries of Time and Space : The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei (San Francisco, California: Night Shade Books, 2002) [nonfiction: coll: edited by S T Joshi and David E Schultz: H P Lovecraft: hb/]
- H.P. Lovecraft: Letters with Donald and Howard Wandrei and to Emil Petaja (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2019) with H P Lovecraft and Howard Wandrei [nonfiction: coll: edited by S T Joshi and David E Schultz: Emil Petaja: pb/]
works as editor
- H P Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1911-1924 (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1965) [coll: edited with August Derleth: hb/Gary Gore, Ronald Rich and Virgil Finlay]
- H P Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1925-1929 (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1968) [coll: edited with August Derleth: hb/Gary Gore, Ronald Rich and Virgil Finlay]
- H P Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1929-1931 (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1971) [coll: edited with August Derleth: hb/Gary Gore, Ronald Rich and Virgil Finlay]
links
- Donald Wandrei and Family: An Inventory of Their Papers at the Minnesota Historical Society
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Project Gutenberg
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry