Fritz Leiber - Life

Life

Leiber (first syllable sounds like "lye") was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr., and Virginia Leiber, and, for a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps. (Theater and actors were 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 General Theological Seminary and worked for a time as a lay preacher. In 1934, he toured with his parents' acting company, Fritz Leiber & Co.

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. His first published story appeared in 1939 in Unknown magazine.

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.

Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated a move to San Francisco, California, 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.

In 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. Many people believed that Leiber was living in poverty on skid row. He seems to have suffered periods of penury; 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. 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.

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 ground-breaking essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume Fafhrd and Me (1990).