| Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: the Makers of Heroic Fantasy | |
|---|---|
Dust-jacket illustration by Tim Kirk for Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers |
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| Author(s) | L. Sprague de Camp |
| Cover artist | Tim Kirk |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | biography |
| Publisher | Arkham House |
| Publication date | 1976 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | xxix, 313 pp |
| ISBN | 0-87054-076-9 |
| OCLC Number | 2782776 |
| Dewey Decimal | 809/.933/7 |
| LC Classification | PR830.F3 D4 |
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 in an edition of 5,431 copies. 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 of its most important early writers. After a general survey of the development of modern fantasy, individual chapters deal with 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. A final chapter concerns lesser or later literary lights C. L. Moore, Leslie Barringer, Nictzin Dyalhis, Clifford Ball, Henry Kuttner, Norvell W. Page and 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)).
Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: the Makers of Heroic Fantasy contains the following:
Richard A. Lupoff praised de Camp as "an honest, thoroughgoing, and effective researcher, declaring that LS&S "will almost instantly become a standard reference."[1]