Lin Carter

• 1. Introduction

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  Lin Carter published his first letter in a pulp magazine in 1943, when he was thirteen years old. By the time he died in February 1988, he had written an average of six books a year at his peak, edited dozens of anthologies, and resurrected a whole shelf of forgotten fantasy classics that might otherwise have stayed buried. He was prolific, controversial, self-promotional, and by some measures more important as an editor than as a writer. His life raises a question that follows him through everything: can a person who borrows so relentlessly from others still leave something genuinely new behind?

• 2. Soldier, Copywriter, Fan

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  Carter was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, on the 9th of June 1930. Long before he wrote a word professionally, he was a reader and a fan, immersed in science fiction and fantasy from childhood. After serving in the United States Army infantry in Korea from 1951 to 1953, he enrolled at Columbia University and studied under poet Leonie Adams in her Poetry Workshop during 1953-54. For most of the following decade he worked as an advertising and publishers' copywriter, a trade he kept until 1969. The discipline of writing copy, punchy and targeted, likely shaped the brisk pace that runs through even his most derivative fiction. He spent much of his writing career living in Hollis, New York, and later moved to East Orange, New Jersey.

• 3. Clubs, Circles, and Asimov

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  Carter was a member of the Trap Door Spiders, an all-male literary banqueting club whose gatherings Isaac Asimov used as the model for the Black Widowers, his fictional group of mystery-solvers. Carter himself was the basis for the Black Widowers character Mario Gonzalo. He also belonged to the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, known as SAGA, a loosely organized group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s. Some of those writers appeared in Carter's own Flashing Swords! anthology series, which ran from 1973 to 1981. In his later years he gathered writers for meetings he called the New Kalem Club, in tribute to an earlier literary circle. Those gatherings were attended by Robert M. Price, S. T. Joshi, Peter Cannon, and occasionally Frank Belknap Long.

• 4. The Ballantine Fantasy Line

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  From 1969 to 1974, Carter served as editor for Ballantine Books, where he ran the Adult Fantasy series. The line brought back into mass-market paperback editions authors who had fallen out of print or wide circulation, among them Lord Dunsany, William Morris, Clark Ashton Smith, James Branch Cabell, Hope Mirrlees, and Evangeline Walton. David G. Hartwell praised the series for bringing into mass editions nearly all the adult fantasy stories and novels worth reading. Carter also used the platform to give new writers a foothold, including Katherine Kurtz, Joy Chant, and Sanders Anne Laubenthal. He also sponsored the Gandalf Award, an early equivalent of science fiction's Hugo Award for fantasy, given annually by the World Science Fiction Society from 1974 to 1981, until Carter's failing health brought it to a halt. The award's purpose was eventually taken over by the World Fantasy Awards, first presented in 1975.

• 5. The Imitative Writer

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  Carter's fiction was openly and consciously modeled on writers he admired. His best-known series began with The Wizard of Lemuria, published by Ace Books in March 1965, which drew on both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. The Thongor the Barbarian character from that book appeared in a Marvel Comics run of Creatures on the Loose for eight issues in 1973-74. His Callisto books were a direct tribute to Burroughs' Barsoom stories; his Zanthodon series echoed Burroughs' Pellucidar novels; his Green Star novels blended Clark Ashton Smith and Burroughs; his Mysteries of Mars series followed Leigh Brackett; his Prince Zarkon books were based on the Doc Savage series by Kenneth Robeson. David Pringle's The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy described Carter as having specialized in derivative hackwork of no conspicuous merit, while also acknowledging he was enormously influential as an editor who played a key role in establishing fantasy as a popular genre. Carter identified his models openly in his own introductions, and the sixth novel in his Callisto sequence even featured Carter himself as the protagonist.

• 6. Posthumous Collaborations and Mythos Work

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  Carter produced what he described as posthumous collaborations with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. He finished a number of Howard's incomplete Kull stories and worked on Conan the Barbarian tales, often alongside L. Sprague de Camp. The Smith collaborations took a different form: Carter usually built entirely new stories around title ideas or brief fragments from Smith's notes. Many of those stories drew on Smith's invented Book of Eibon and overlapped with H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Carter also wrote extensively in the Mythos tradition on his own. His Cthulhu Mythos fiction was later gathered in The Xothic Legend Cycle, edited by Robert M. Price, though even that collection left many Carter Mythos stories uncollected. In the 1970s Carter published a single issue of his own fantasy fanzine, Kadath, named after Lovecraft's fictional setting. About 3,000 copies were printed, but a dispute between the printer and the binder led to most of the run being discarded. Carter believed only around 30 copies survived. One of them held his Cthulhu Mythos story, "The City of Pillars".

• 7. Khymyrium and the Unfinished Record

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  Carter's self-proclaimed magnum opus was an epic fantasy he called Khymyrium, or in full, Khymyrium: The City of the Hundred Kings, from the Coming of Aviathar the Lion to the Passing of Spheridion the Doomed. He claimed to have begun it around 1959. The project aimed to resurrect the style of medieval chronicle fantasy, the kind found in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, and to introduce a new invented system of magic he called Enstarrment. Carter published three excerpts as standalone stories between 1969 and 1971. A fourth appeared posthumously in a 1998 fanzine called Fungi. His most thorough public account of the project appeared in his book Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy in 1973. The novel itself was never finished. Among his other abandoned projects were a full Atlantis trilogy canceled after the first book, The Black Star; a five-volume Chronicles of Kylix that reached only three volumes; and a Gondwane epic whose middle section was never published because his publisher canceled the series before the gap could be filled.

• 8. Final Years

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  Cancer most likely caused by heavy smoking struck Carter in 1985. His status as a Korean War veteran allowed him to receive extensive surgery, but the operation failed to cure the cancer and left him disfigured. An experimental prosthesis also failed, and Carter retreated from public life. Despite this, he was working again by 1987. He contributed a regular column to the magazine Crypt of Cthulhu, completed a new book in his Terra Magica series, finished Horror Wears Blue, and saw DAW publish his fantasy Callipygia in February 1988. His cancer returned and spread to his throat. On the day he died, he experienced severe breathing problems due to emphysema, went into cardiac arrest at the hospital, was revived, and then suffered a second, fatal heart attack. He died in Montclair, New Jersey, on the 7th of February 1988. Robert M. Price, his named literary executor and the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu, had been preparing an all-Lin Carter issue of the magazine when word of his death arrived. It became a memorial issue: Crypt of Cthulhu Vol. 7, No 4, whole number 54, Eastertide 1988.