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There has been little news of Arthur Machen or about Arthur Machen since the late 1920’s. He enjoyed a certain popularity for perhaps five years, a popularity that lingered much longer in more literary circles. For the most part Machen had disappeared from the world of literary figures just as his books had disappeared from the bookshops. That he is still read today we know, and we know too, that he has been slowly gaining new readers through the years. In 1933 Machen published his last novel, The Green Round. This has not yet been published in this country, although it is scheduled for publication this year by August Derleth’s “Arkham House.” In 1936 there were published in London two collections of his stories, most of which were reprints of earlier stories with the addition of some new pieces. These books are The Children of the Pool, published by Hutchinson, and The Cosy Room, published by Rich and Cowan. Within the past few years Machen’s stories have appeared in anthologies put together by Dorothy Sayers, Somerset Maughan, Phillip Van Doren Stern, Will Cuppy and, of all people, Boris Karloff!
August Derleth, the youthful sage of Sac Prarie, has been more active than anyone else in recent years in his efforts to spread the magic of Machen. Back in 1937, in the November issue of Ben Abramson’s “Reading and Collecting,” Derleth published an article on Machen, to which was appended a bibliography by Nathan Van Patten. Derleth’s article, the first to appear in almost a decade, followed the pattern of most previous articles about Machen. But Derleth has gone beyond prose. He has, from time to time, included Machen’s more macabre pieces in his various collections of supernatural stories. He has also published, or is planning to publish, reprints of several Machen books.
The late H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Arthur Machen’s work and a foremost exponent of the Machen manner in modern fiction. It is difficult to apply the epithet “pulp writer” to Lovecraft, but that is, after all, what he was. Recent appraisals of his work, and the publication in book form of his stories, have done much to raise him out of this category. It was Lovecraft who introduced Machen to August Derleth and to who knows how many thousands of other readers. In his essay, recently republished by Ben Abramson, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft supplies one of the most up-to-date, if perhaps one-sided, appraisals of Arthur Machen’s work. Lovecraft concentrates his attention, naturally enough, on Machen’s tales of horror and the supernatural. The result is a valuable piece of Machenania but one that should be approached only by an adept. The chance reader or the casual reader would receive a rather specialized view of Machen.