Donald Albert Wandrei (20 April 1908 – 15 October 1987) was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He was the older brother of science fiction writer and artist Howard Wandrei. He had fourteen stories in Weird Tales, another sixteen in Astounding Stories, plus a few in other magazines including Esquire. Wandrei was the co-founder (with August Derleth) of the prestigious fantasy/horror publishing house Arkham House.
Biography
Early life
Wandrei was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. All of his grandparents were early Minnesota settlers. Donald's father, Albert Christian Wandrei, became chief editor of West Publishing Company, America's leading publisher of law books. Donald grew up in his parents' house at 1152 Portland Ave, St Paul and lived there most of his life save for a stint in the Army and occasional sojourns in New York and Hollywood. Donald loved frequent rambles in the woods along the Minnesota River; it was Wandrei who later taught August Derleth the fine art of morel hunting.
1920s
Wandrei attended Central High in St Paul from 1921–24, during which he published short compositions in the school newspaper and avidly read the magazine Science and Invention. In 1923, he began work part-time as a "page-boy" in the Circulation Room of the Saint Paul Public Library, filling reader's requests for books from the storage stacks; this expanded his access to, and reading of, a wide variety of literature. In 1923 and 1924, Wandrei also worked evenings at the Hill Reference Library. He attended the University of Minnesota. While there, he was a student editor and regular columnist on the student newspaper The Minnesota Daily and was also associated with the Minnesota Quarterly Magazine, as well as contributing pieces (often unsigned or pseudonymous) to the campus humour magazine Ski-U-Mah, which was edited by classmate Carl Jacobi. At that time he was enormously influenced by a reading of Arthur Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams. Wandrei graduated in 1928, with a BA in English.
At the age of 16, Wandrei completed his short story "The Red Brain", in which a mysterious Cosmic Dust sweeps through the universe, obliterating the stars. Only Antares, inhabited by a race of viscous Brains, survives – and this last remnant of universal sentience entrusts its fate to the unique, laboratory-created Red Brain in a compelling fable that leaves behind the concerns of human aquarium to revel in the cosmos and the ultimate terror waiting there.
Wandrei started writing in 1926 and his writing career took off around 1932. In late 1927 he hitchhiked from Minnesota to Rhode Island to visit H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft conducted him on a grand antiquarian tour of Providence and then on to similar tours in Boston, Salem and Marblehead. There was also an excursion to Warren, Rhode Island, later made famous by Wandrei's reminiscences in the Arkham House volume Marginalia (1944) during which Wandrei, Lovecraft and James Ferdinand Morton each sampled twenty-eight different flavors of ice cream at Maxfield's ice-cream parlour.
In 1925, Wandrei gave Clark Ashton Smith $50 so the Auburn poet could see Sandalwood through the press.
Wandrei's first book, begun at age 18 and published when he was but 20, was the poetry volume Ecstasy & Other Poems which was published by W. Paul Cook's The Recluse Press in 1928. The book's verse shows homage to Clark Ashton Smith and to Smith's poetic mentor George Sterling.
1930s including co-founding Arkham House
Wandrei was active in pulp magazines until the late 1930s. He was a member of the "Lovecraft Circle", as a friend and protégé of H. P. Lovecraft, corresponding with other members of the circle (Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, etc.). Wandrei personally made the case for Weird Tales to publish Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" telling Farnsworth Wright that unless he published the tale, Lovecraft would look for other magazines to submit stories to.
As an accomplished poet, Wandrei was the first to write a series of sonnets for Weird Tales, "Sonnets of the Midnight Hours". Lovecraft liked the idea so much, he embarked on his own series, "Fungi From Yuggoth". Robert E. Howard also wrote his own series with "Sonnets out of Bedlam".
Wandrei's second book and second book of verse) was Dark Odyssey (Webb Publishing Co, 1931) illustrated with five illustrations by his brother Howard Wandrei.