Biography
Wagner was the fourth and youngest child of Aubrey J. Wagner and Dorothea Huber; his father was an official in the Tennessee Valley Authority. Wagner earned a history degree from Kenyon College in 1967, and a psychiatry degree from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. As noted above, he disliked the medical profession, which he abandoned upon establishing himself as a writer.
Wagner was productive as both a writer and editor/anthologist; see below. His close friends included the writer Manly Wade Wellman, two of whose collections he published under the Carcosa publishing imprint.
Wagner died on October 14, 1994, essentially of longterm alcoholism. It was reported in a late 1994 issue of the Newsletter of the Horror Writers of America that Wagner's causes of death were heart failure and liver failure.
Exorcisms and Ecstasies, a final posthumous volume of uncollected stories, miscellany and tributes appeared from small press publisher Fedogan & Bremer in 1997. Night Shade Books has published the complete Kane stories (novels and shorts) in two hardcover volumes.
Read more about this topic: Karl Edward Wagner
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