Wind Over Wisconsin owes its being not so much to precedents as to a literary and artistic movement of the 1930s.

While Derleth claimed his "Sac Prairie Saga" to be in a league with Honore du Balzac's Human Comedy (1842-1846) and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), it mimics them in magnitude only. The Saga's real literary sister is the fiction of the 1930s which strove to depict a sense of place.

While the concerns of Sac Prairie are in no way so cosmic as those in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Derleth creates from his "own postage stamp of native soil" a microcosm no less complex and no less complete.

Derleth uses the same techniques Faulkner does of introducing a minor character in one book and picking him up as the protagonist of another. Like Faulkner, he creates history, geography, social milieu, and population out...