WANDREI, Donald

(1908-1987)

   US writer and editor, founder with August DERLETH in 1939 of ARKHAM HOUSE, formed initially to publish the work of H.P. LOVECRAFT, whom both admired deeply. DW resigned his interest in the firm after WWII - when he also stopped writing new fiction - and after Derleth's death in 1971 declined to resume it. As a writer he was justifiably best known forhis FANTASY and weird stories, beginning with "The Red Brain" (1927 Weird Tales), a tale that incorporates a bungled sf premise about the nature ofmatter into a narrative whose deepest effect is one of chill horror at the cosmos. Later sf work, much of it in ASF 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) share the sense of the grotesqueness of the world espoused in thatfirst story. 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 work, making, as usualin DW's 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 Lovecraftcollections and ed 3 vols of Lovecraft's Selected Letters: 1911-1924 (coll 1965), 1925-1929 (coll 1968), and 1929-1931 (coll 1971).DW'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.

   JC

   See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COSMOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; GREAT AND SMALL; PARALLEL WORLDS; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.