Fritz Leiber wrote the most delectable swords-and-sorcery tales of all! His various adventures of the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd stand at the very pinnacle of what swords and sorcery writing should be.
I was lucky enough to know Fritz Leiber just a little bit. He came to Phoenix for IguanaCon in 1978, and did the greatest reading of a H.P. Lovecraft story that I've ever heard. And once, while we were in San Francisco for a gaming convention, Elizabeth Danforth, Michael A. Stackpole, and I visited Fritz in his apartment in a rickety old building in downtown San Francisco. He was very kind to let three unknown fans just come up and see him, and we saw marvels indeed inside his tiny quarters. We saw the Gray Mauser! And Hugos! And Nebulas!
Fritz Leiber was born December 25, 1910 in Chicago, Illinois. He was
the son of Fritz and Virginia Leiber (both Shakespearian actors), and he
spent some time on the stage with them as a young man. He started his
adult career as an Episcopal minister (1932-33) in New Jersey, which must
have been tough, as he soon left the church to go on stage as a Shakespearian
actor (1934-36). He then went on to four years as a book editor for
Consolidated Book Publishers in Chicago (1937-41). He finally left Chicago
for California to be a teacher at Occidental College in speech and
drama. During World War II he worked as a precision inspector for Douglas
Aircraft in Santa Monica. He went back to Chicago to be a mazazine editor for about 8 years.
From 1956 until his death he was a free-lance
writer, doing much of his best work in the 1970s.
Fritz married a writer named Jonquil Stephens on Jan. 16, 1936, and his only son, Justin (also a very fine author) was born in 1938. Jonquil died in September 1969. After decades of solitude, Fritz married someone named Margo Skinner on May 15, 1992.
I have to admit that I'm doing this page about Fritz because I admire his Gray Mouser and Fafhrd stories so much. These tales epitomize the perfect friendship, and contain so much wit and drollery along with fantastic conceits and adventures, that they have always been my model for how swords and sorcery fiction should be written. My stories of Shang and Vyrre are meant to be in the tradition of the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd. Here is a partial bibliography of Gray Mouser and Fafhrd books--I think there are other editions, but I'm not certain. This bibliography is from CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS new revision series, vol. 40, p. 257.
Aside from the swords and sorcery, I like Leiber's cat stories and chess stories better than anything else. I don't know how many cat stories Fritz has written--I don't think I've read them all, but here are some good ones:
Those last three titles appeared in a small press book called KREATIVITY FOR KATS & OTHER FELINE FANTASIES, published by Wildside Press in 1992 which I picked up at a rare book sale for a mere $12--the original price. It's only a very little book, but I jumped at the chance to get it, and then I gave it to my daughter Jillian who also admires Fritz's feline tales.
Death finally caught up with Fritz on Sept. 5, 1992. His second wife, Margo Skinner soon followed him on Jan. 16, 1993.
This page created by a Fritz Leiber fan named Ken St. Andre . . . and was last revised on August 22, 1998.
