Howard Haycraft (July 25, 1905November 12, 1991) was an American writer, editor, and publisher.
Haycraft was born on July 24, 1905, in Madelia, Minnesota, to Marie (Stelzer) and Julius Everett Haycraft. He received a bachelor's degree from the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...
in 1928.
Haycraft began working at the
H. W. Wilson Company
The H. W. Wilson Company, Inc. is a publisher and indexing company that was founded in 1898 and is located in The Bronx, New York. It provides print and digital content aimed at patrons of public school, college, and professional libraries in bot ...
in 1929 after a brief stint at the
University of Minnesota Press
The University of Minnesota Press is a university press that is part of the University of Minnesota. It had annual revenues of just over $8 million in fiscal year 2018.
Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is best known for its book ...
. He was president of H. W. Wilson from 1953 to 1967 and chairman of its board of directors thereafter.
At H. W. Wilson, Haycraft edited and contributed to reference works about writers and literature. He was fascinated by mysteries and
detective fiction
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as s ...
. His book ''Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story'' (1941)—described in a profile published that year as the "first full-length history and survey of police fiction"—laid out an early critical view of the mystery genre and its theory. ''Murder for Pleasure'' identifies the origins of detective fiction in the work of
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wide ...
, surveys the work of authors Haycraft identified as being of great quality or historical importance, and provides an overview of the critical literature on detective fiction up to its publication.
A resident of
Hightstown, New Jersey
Hightstown is a borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 5,494,