As Derleth put it, in
Return to Walden West (1970): "Long ago, during the years of my childhood, I was lost forever to the world in which men engaged life in momentous concerns and affairs, charmed away by the world intimately near to my senses ... and all I did thereafter was done to enable me to live out that special enchantment and explore that world where the major concerns of other men did not matter--not fame or wealth or the pursuit of other phantoms conjured up by hope or love, valor or avarice."
August William Derleth was born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, a village on the Wisconsin River. His parents, William Julius and Rose Louise Volk Derleth, were third-generation residents in this town of primarily German immigrants, where most of the children spoke German before they learned English. At that time, Sauk City was a thriving country village with wooden sidewalks, livery stables, kitchen gardens, and blacksmith shops, surrounded by rugged forests and rich farmland--full of fascinating sights and sounds to nourish a growing child's curiosity.
Derleth's parents and grandparents encouraged both his independence and his love of books; and in later years, he wrote nostalgically of his childhood world, from which he could "look west along the land which reached out to the prairie west of town under a row of streetlights, lemon yellow of evenings, opening up every twilight a world of down and afterglow, new moon and evening star, filled with unlimited promises of memorable tomorrows."
Derleth attended the local parochial elementary school, where he was fortunate enough to have teachers who nurtured his gifts.
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