Derleth, August. The Shield of the Valiant (New York: Scribner's, 1945) 511 p.

The town of Sac Prairie, Wisconsin, Derleth's fictional version of Sauk City, makes its way through the 1930s towards the next world war. The town librarian, Miss Mergan will not make it though. She is dying of lung cancer.

But it was not the thought of dying that touched her. It was not the thought of her personal ceasing to exist at all; it was the thought, curiously, of leaving Sac Prairie. She had fought for Sac Prairie so long that she was frightened now at the thought of what the village would become without her. It was not that she did not know Sac Prairie would go on as before, but only that she realized how much she had fought the rising tide of ignorance, of bigotry, of reactionary thought in her village, how she had kept education liberal by her position on the Board of Education, how she had held the library open to books of all kinds, regardless of those who were against this or that on various trumped-up grounds of bigotry and ignorance. (p. 7).

We never get to know Miss Mergan's first name. Even her sister Georgina, who only appears for a few pages to take care of her in her last days, gets a first name. But the town librarian is only Miss Mergan.