Gateway Essentials: L. Sprague De Camp

Lyon Sprague de Camp was born in 1907 and died in 2000. During a writing career that spanned seven decades, he wrote over a hundred books in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, non-fiction and biography. Although arguably best known for his continuation of Robert E. Howard‘s Conan stories, de Camp was an important figure in the formative period of modern SF, alongside the likes of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, and was a winner of the Hugo, World Fantasy Life Achievement and SFWA Grand Master awards. Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956) was an American SF and fantasy author.

He worked in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt on many books, most famously the whimsical Harold Shea series, and it’s these that we recommend as a starting point for exploring his work:

Of course, if whimsical fantasy isn’t your preference, you should move right along to de Camp’s more serious work, starting with Lest Darkness Fall, a time-travel novel featuring a 20th century man trying to prevent the fall of the Roman Empire.

You can find these and more of L. Sprague de Camp’s work via his Author page on the Gateway website, and read about him in his  entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.