Life
De Camp was born in New York City, one of three sons of Lyon de Camp and Emma Beatrice Sprague. His maternal grandfather was the accountant, banker, pioneering Volapükist and Civil War veteran Charles Ezra Sprague. De Camp once noted that he rarely used pen-names, "partly because my own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do."
An aeronautical engineer by profession, De Camp conducted his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology (where his roommate was at one point noted rocket fuel scientist John D. Clark), and earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in Aeronautical Engineering 1930. He earned his Master of Science degree in Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1933. De Camp was also a surveyor and an expert in patents.
In 1939, de Camp married Catherine Crook, with whom he later collaborated on works of science fiction and nonfiction beginning in the 1960s.
During World War II, de Camp served as a researcher at the Philadelphia Naval Yard along with his fellow writers Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. De Camp eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer.
De Camp was a member of the all-male literary and dining club the "Trap Door Spiders" in New York City, which served as the basis of Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the "Black Widowers". De Camp himself was the model for the character named "Geoffrey Avalon".
De Camp was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loosely-knit group of Heroic fantasy writers that was founded during the 1960s. Some of the works of this group were gathered together in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.
The de Camps moved to Plano, Texas, in 1989. Sprague de Camp died there on November 6, 2000, seven months after his wife, on what would have been her birthday, just three weeks before his own 93rd birthday. His ashes were interred along with hers in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
De Camp's personal library of about 1,200 books was acquired for auction by Half Price Books in 2005. The collection included books inscribed by fellow writers, such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, as well as de Camp himself.
Read more about this topic: L. Sprague De Camp
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