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Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having in fact created the term. Moreover, he excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award-winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. ==Life== Leiber was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr., and Virginia Bronson Leiber and, for a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps. (Theater and actors are prominently featured in his fiction.) He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company before studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with honors (1928–32). In 1932, he studied at the Anglican-affiliated General Theological Seminary and worked for a time as a lay preacher. In 1934, he toured with his parents' acting company, Fritz Leiber & Co. Six short stories in the 2010 collection ''Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works'' carry 1934 and 1935 dates. As well as being an actor and lay preacher, Leiber worked variously as a college teacher of drama, and a staff writer for an encyclopedia, and he tried free-lancing sporadically. He introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the August 1939 number of ''Unknown'' magazine, edited by John W. Campbell.〔〔Anderson, Poul (1974), "The Wizard of Nehwon", ''The Best of Fritz Leiber'', NY: Doubleday, pp. vii–xv.〕 He married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936, and their son, Justin Leiber, was born in 1938. During World War II, he decided that the struggle against fascism was more important than his long-held pacifist convictions, and he accepted a job in aircraft production.〔 After working on the staff of ''Science Digest'' for a dozen years, he wrote what Poul Anderson called "a lot of the best science fiction and fantasy in the business". Eventually, he moved from Chicago to southern California and started writing full-time.〔 In 1941 the family moved back to California, and Leiber began working as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. After 1947, a year which marked his first hardcover publication with his collection ''Night's Black Agents'' (Arkham House), the family moved back to Chicago, where Leiber became editor of ''Science Digest''. In 1958 they returned to Los Angeles, where Leiber became a full-time writer. Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated a move to San Francisco, and three years as a drunk, but he returned to his original form with a fantasy novel set in modern-day San Francisco, ''Our Lady of Darkness'', which is about a writer of weird tales who must deal with the death of his wife and his recovery from alcoholism. Leiber seems to have suffered periods of penury in the 1970s; Harlan Ellison has written of his anger at finding that the much-awarded Leiber had to write his novels on a manual typewriter that was propped up over the sink in his apartment, and Marc Laidlaw wrote that, when visiting Leiber as a fan in 1976, he "was shocked to find him occupying one small room of a seedy San Francisco residence hotel, its squalor relieved mainly by walls of books".〔Laidlaw, Marc, "On ''Our Lady of Darkness''," in the anthology ''Horror: Another 100 Best Books'', edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Carroll & Graf, 2005.〕 But other reports suggest that Leiber preferred to live simply in the city, spending his money on dining, movies and travel. In the last years of his life, royalty checks from TSR, the makers of ''Dungeons and Dragons'', who had licensed the mythos of the ''Fafhrd and Gray Mouser'' series, were enough in themselves to ensure that he lived comfortably. In 1992, the last year of his life, Leiber married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a journalist and poet with whom he had been friends for many years. Leiber's death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science fiction convention in London, Ontario, with Skinner. The cause of his death was given as "organic brain disease". He wrote a 100-page-plus autobiography, ''Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex'', which can be found in ''The Ghost Light'' (1984). Leiber's own literary criticism, including several essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume ''Fafhrd and Me'' (1990). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fritz Leiber」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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