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The House On The Mound
August Derleth

       

Quality Paperback, 250 pp.
ISBN 1-896648-26-6 @ $20.00

Black Cloth Hard Cover with Dustjacket, 250 pp.
ISBN 1-896648-26-6 @ $28.00

About the Book

Dark-haired, blue-eyed Jane Dousman was certainly one of the most attractive personalities of frontier Wisconsin. She was a woman of great beauty, high-spirited and warm-hearted.
    Her husband, Hercules Dousman, was an even stronger character, a man of remarkable capacity, friendly, talented, indefatigable. As fur-trader, railroad-builder, grain-shipper, he became the most influential figure of the upper Mississippi Valley and the Midwest's first millionaire.
    For years Hercules Dousman had known and had secretly loved Jane, youthful wife of King Joe Rolette, chief of the Astor fur brigades. After King Joe's death, Jane and Hercules were married.
    Theirs was a true love match, and this narrative of their life together is the story of a mature and happily rewarding romance.
    It was for Jane that the house on the mound was built. There, in the year that the mound became part of the new state of Wisconsin, their son was born. And at the same time, a shadow falls across Hercules' happiness. At this point the story begins....

THE HOUSE ON THE MOUND, originally published in 1958, was the long-awaited sequel to BRIGHT JOURNEY (1940), which told the story of Hercules Dousman's and Jane's early years. It covers their lives together from 1848 to 1857 in the Villa Louis — the house on the mound at Prairie du Chien.

August Derleth (1909-1971) was one the most prolific writers of this century. He wrote and edited more than 180 books of fiction, journals, histories, biographies, and poetry. He was a fourth-generation citizen of Sauk City, a village on the great bend of the Wisconsin River. Unlike so many other gifted writers of the Midwest, Derleth elected to cultivate the home soil, to write about the land and the people he lived with and knew. As a result, his roots are deep and his books are real and lasting portraits of mid-America. Taken as a whole, his work is — as Sinclair Lewis put it — "Something that will go far beyond Wisconsin."

What The Critics Said:

"The House on the Mound is what Hercules Dousman called the mansion he built at Prairie du Chien in 1843 for his second wife. Today, as a museum of the state historical society, it is known as Villa Louis.... The author's love for Wisconsin and its history is evident throughout the book. A prodigious amount of work underlies every chapter. The result is a warm, convincing evocation of the past." — Milwaukee Journal

"August Derleth is one of the best regional writers" — Chicago Tribune

"Mr. Derleth writes with deep love of his home state.... His is a regional novel of a high order of excellence."
— New York Times.