Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers

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Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: the Makers of Heroic Fantasy is a 1976 work of collective biography on the formative authors of the heroic fantasy genre by L. Sprague de Camp, published by Arkham House. Most of its chapters are revised versions of articles that initially appeared in the magazine Fantastic from 1971-1976.

The work presents the history of the genre through a discussion of the lives and works if its most important early writers, including William Morris, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, E. R. Eddison, Robert E. Howard, Fletcher Pratt, Clark Ashton Smith, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. H. White, with a final chapter on lesser or later literary lights, most notably Fritz Leiber.

The book includes an introduction by de Camp's colleague Lin Carter, who remedies what he considers de Camp's most egregious omission by providing a profile of de Camp himself (also a formative author in the genre).

De Camp also produced separate full-length biographies of two of the authors treated, H. P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft: a Biography (1975)) and Robert E. Howard (Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard (1983)).