Donald Wandrei

Donald Wandrei
Donald Wandrei, date unknown
Born	Donald Albert Wandrei (1908-04-20)April 20, 1908 Saint Paul, Minnesota
Died	October 15, 1987(1987-10-15) (aged 79) Saint Paul, Minnesota
Occupation	Writer, poet, editor
Genre	Fantasy, Science fiction, Weird

Donald Albert Wandrei (April 20, 1908 – October 15, 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. He was the co-founder (with August Derleth) of the prestigious fantasy/horror publishing house Arkham House.

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. 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 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 he 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 fellow 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.