Fritz Leiber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Big Time

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Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. He was also an expert chess player and a champion fencer.

Leiber (first syllable rhymes with "shy")

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is work as a writer earned much praise but little money, a problem exacerbated by bouts of alcoholism. Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated a three-year drunk,

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Leiber's death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science-fiction convention in London, Ontario with Skinner. The cause of his death was given as "organic brain disease."

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Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Main article: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

His legacy appears to have been consolidated by the most famous of his creations, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, written over a span of 50 years. The first of these, "Two Sought Adventure", appeared in Unknown in 1939. They are concerned with an unlikely pair of heroes found in and around the city of Lankhmar. (Fafhrd was based on Leiber himself and the Mouser on his friend Harry Otto Fischer, and the two characters created in a series of letters exchanged by the two in the mid-1930s) These stories were among the progenitors of many of the tropes of the sword and sorcery genre (a term coined by Leiber). They are also notable among sword and sorcery stories in that, over the course of the stories, his two heroes mature, take on more responsibilities, and eventually settle down into marriage.

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"Coming Attraction"

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