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Fritz Leiber
19101992
Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr., was born in Chicago on December 24, 1910, the son of distinguished Shakespearean actor and theatrical manager Fritz Leiber and Virginia Bronson Leiber. Exposure to members of his mother and father's acting troupe introduced the young Leiber to a variety of interests, including reading, chess, and the stage. Leiber spent most of his childhood in Chicago, eventually enrolling in the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a B.A. in 1932.
Upon graduating, Leiber served as an Episcopal minister but a crisis of conscience over his lack of religious faith sent him back to graduate school. After a brief but unsuccessful stint on the stage, Leiber returned once again to school, where he met Jonquil Stephens. The two were married in 1936 and moved to Hollywood to live with Leiber's parents while Fritz embarked on an abortive career in film. Their only son, Justin, was born in 1938. Over the next few decades, Leiber held a succession of jobs in publishing.
While at college, Leiber was introduced to the work of weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, whom he would later cite as one of the most important influences on his writing. He corresponded with Lovecraft a short time before the latter's death in 1937 and sent his early efforts at fiction writing for Lovecraft's criticism. Also while in college, Leiber met Harry Otto Fischer, who shared many of Leiber's interests. In their correspondence, the two playfully imagined themselves as heroic fantasy characters named Fafhrd (Leiber) and the Gray Mouser (Fischer), who became the subjects of several stories by Leiber.
Leiber submitted several stories for publication to Weird Tales in the late 1930s, eventually selling his horror story "The Automatic Pistol" in 1938 (not published until 1940). To John W. Campbell's fantasy magazine Unknown, he sent the tales of Fafhrd and the Mouser that had been rejected by Weird Tales. The Fafhrd and Mouser stories, with their squabbling antihero characters and sly humor, were immediately recognized as alternatives to the stereotypical blood-and-thunder type of heroic fantasy that hitherto

 
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