Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber
Pseudonym(s)	Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (full name)
Birth Date	December 24, 1910
Birthplace	Chicago, Illinois, USA
Death Date	September 5, 1992
Deathplace	San Francisco, California, USA
Nationality	American
Genre	Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
Spouse	Jonquil Stephens ​(m. 1936; died 1969)​ Margo Skinner ​(m. 1992)

𝓦𝐓 Fritz Leiber was an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He was also a correspondent of Howard Phillips Lovecraft in the year before Lovecraft's death. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia writes, "Leiber wrote some of the most distinguished science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature of the century, and is perhaps the only one of HPL's colleagues who can rival him in literary substance."

Much of Leiber's early fiction shows Lovecraft's influence; some of this work was published in Leiber's Arkham House collection, Night's Black Agents (1947), and other pieces were collected in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers in the Dark (Wildside Press, 2003). Another early novella with "strong Lovecraftian elements", The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, was published in 1993 by Tor.

Very little of Leiber's work has overt connections to the Cthulhu Mythos. One such story, "The Terror from the Depths", was begun in 1937 in the wake of Lovecraft's death and not completed until 1975, in time to be published in Edward P. Bergland's Disciples of Cthulhu the next year. Another story, "To Arkham and the Stars", which revisits Lovecraft's Miskatonic University setting and includes many of his characters, was published in 1966 in Arkham House's Dark Brotherhood.

Leiber wrote for Weird Tales under the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith (beginning in April 1940). His greatest fame is as the creator of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser and their Lankhmar setting in the Swords series of novels and stories, which created an ironic and almost post-modern twist on the Sword and Sorcery genre.

Lovecraft read a draft of the first story in the Swords series, "Adept's Gambit", and gave Leiber substantial feedback. The story originally contained Mythos elements, but these were removed before publication.

In Other Media

Created in "The Terror From the Depths", the Tunnelers Below were later expanded upon by Chaosium in their Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

Selected Bibliography

Fiction

• "The Sunken Land" (1942)
• "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" (1945)
• "Adept's Gambit" (1947)
• "Diary in the Snow" (1947)
• "The Dead Man" (1950)
• "A Bit of the Dark World" (1962)
• "To Arkham and the Stars" (1966)
• "The Terror From the Depths" (1976)
• Our Lady of Darkness (1977)
• The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (1997)

Non-fiction

• "A Literary Copernicus" (1949)
• "My Correspondence with Lovecraft" (1958)
• "The 'Whisperer' Reexamined" (1964)
• "Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin: Lovecraft's Contribution to Speculative Fiction" (1966)
• "The Cthulhu Mythos: Wondrous and Terrible" (1975)
• "Lovecraft in My Life" (1976)

Poetry

• The Demons of the Upper Air

Links and references

• Fritz Leiber at Wikipedia.org
• Fritz Leiber at the Marvel Database