Donald Wandrei

Donald Albert Wandrei (April 20, 1908–October 15, 1987) was an American science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction writer, poet and editor. He wrote as Donald Wandrei. 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.

Biography

Wandrei was born in Saint Paul, Ramsey County, 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. He loved frequent rambles in the woods along the Minnesota River; it was Wandrei who later taught August Derleth the fine art of morel hunting.

He attended Central High in St Paul, Minnesota (1921–24), during which period 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 he also worked evenings at the Hill Reference Library. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1928, with a BA in English. While there he was a student editor on the student newspaper The Minnesota Daily. At that time he was enormously influenced by a reading of Arthur Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams.