Leiber, Fritz [Reuter]

   (1910–1992)

   Writer, editor, actor, and teacher. He first discovered HPL when he read “The Colour out of Space” in Amazing Stories (September 1927). He and his wife Jonquil corresponded with HPL during the last six months of his life. HPL read a draft of Leiber’s “Adept’s Gambit” (the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story), and in a lengthy letter of December 19, 1936, suggested numerous alterations. The story originally contained Cthulhu Mythos elements, but Leiber excised them before publication. It was first published in Night’s Black Agents(1947), which contains several stories influenced by HPL. HPL also read Leiber’s poem cycle, “Demons of the Upper Air” (first published as a booklet, 1969). Leiber began a full-fledged Mythos tale, “The Terror from the Depths,” in 1937; it was completed in 1975 and published in Edward P.Berglund’s Disciples of Cthulhu (1976) and in the revised edition (1990) of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos . Another novella written at this time, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (published 1997), has strong Lovecraftian elements. Conjure Wife(1953) was perhaps inspired in part by “The Dreams in the Witch House.” “To Arkham and the Stars” (in HPL’s DB) is a kind of parody homage to HPL. Leiber was the author of many articles on HPL, including “A Literary Copernicus” (in Cats;rpt. FDOCand LR), “My Correspondence with Lovecraft” ( Fresco,Spring 1958; rpt. LR),“The ‘Whisperer’ Re-examined” ( Haunted,December 1964), “Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin” (in DB;rpt. FDOC and LR), “The Cthulhu Mythos: Wondrous and Terrible” ( Fantastic,June 1975), and “Lovecraft in My Life” ( Journal of the H.P.Lovecraft Society,1976). Leiber wrote some of the most distinguished science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature of the century and is perhaps the only one of HPL’s colleagues who can rival him in literary substance.

   See Stefan Dziemianowicz, “Dead Ringers: The Leiber-Lovecraft Connection,” Crypt No. 76 (Hallowmas 1990): 8–13; Bruce Byfield, Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber (Necronomicon Press, 1991); Nicholaus Clements, “Lovecraft and the Early Leiber,” LS No. 41 (Spring 1999): 23–24; S.T.Joshi, “Passing the Torch: H.P.Lovecraft’s Influence on Fritz Leiber,” Studies in Weird FictionNo. 24 (Winter 1999): 17–25.