Laurence Stephen Lowry (1 November 1887 – 23 February 1976) was an English artist born in Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years.

Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of Northern England during the early 20th century. He had a distinctive style of painting and is best known for urban landscapes peopled with human figures often referred to as "matchstick men". He also painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits, and the unpublished "marionette" works, which were only found after his death.

Because of his use of stylised figures and the lack of weather effects in many of his landscapes he is sometimes characterised as a naïve^[1] 'Sunday painter' although this is not the position of the galleries that have organised retrospectives of his works.^[2][3][4][5]

A large collection of Lowry's work is on permanent public display in a purpose-built art gallery on Salford Quays, appropriately named the Lowry.

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

Lowry was born in November 1887 at 8 Barrett Street, Old Trafford, in Stretford.^[6] It was a difficult birth, and his mother Elizabeth, who hoped for a girl, was uncomfortable even looking at him at first. Later she expressed envy of her sister Mary, who had "three splendid daughters" instead of one "clumsy boy". Lowry's father Robert, a clerk for the Jacob Earnshaw and Son Property Company, was a withdrawn and introverted man whom Lowry once described as "a cold fish" and "(the sort of man who) realised he had a life to live and did his best to get through it."^[7]

After Lowry's birth, his mother's health was too poor for her to continue teaching. She is reported to have been gifted and respected, with aspirations of becoming a concert pianist. She was an irritable, nervous woman brought up to expect high standards by her stern father. Like him, she was controlling and intolerant of failure. She used illness as a means of securing the attention and obedience of her mild and affectionate husband and she dominated her son in the same way. Lowry maintained, in interviews conducted later in his life, that he had an unhappy childhood, growing up in a repressive family atmosphere. Although his mother demonstrated no appreciation of her son's gifts as an artist, a number of books Lowry received as Christmas presents from his parents are inscribed to "Our dearest Laurie." At school he made few friends and showed no academic aptitude. His father was affectionate towards him but was, by all accounts, a quiet man who was at his most comfortable fading into the background as an unobtrusive presence.^[8][9]

Much of Lowry's early years were spent in the leafy Manchester suburb of Victoria Park, Rusholme but in 1909, due to financial pressures, the family moved to 117 Station Road in the industrial town of Pendlebury. Here the landscape comprised textile mills and factory chimneys rather than trees. Lowry later recalled: "At first I detested it, and then, after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it...One day I missed a train from Pendlebury - (a place) I had ignored for seven years — and as I left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company's mill ... The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out... I watched this scene — which I'd looked at many times without seeing — with rapture..."^[10]

Education[link]

The Peel Building where Lowry studied during his time at the Salford Royal Technical College. The building overlooks Peel Park, the subject of a number of his paintings.

After leaving school, Lowry took private art lessons in the evenings on antique and freehand drawing. In 1905, he secured a place at the Manchester Municipal College of Art, where he studied under the French Impressionist artist Pierre Adolphe Valette.^[11] Lowry was full of praise for Valette as a teacher, remarking "I cannot over-estimate the effect on me of the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of French impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris".^[12] In 1915 he graduated to the Salford Royal Technical College (now the University of Salford) where he continued his studies until 1925. Here, he developed his interest in industrial landscapes and began to establish his style.^[13]

Death of his mother[link]

His father died in 1932, leaving debts. His mother, subject to neurosis and depression, became bedridden and dependent on her son for care. Lowry painted after his mother had fallen asleep, between 10pm and 2am, or, depending how tired he was, he might stay up for another hour adding features. Many paintings produced during this period were damning self-portraits (often referred to as the "Horrible Heads" series), which demonstrate the influence of expressionism and may have been inspired by an exhibition of van Gogh's work at Manchester Art Gallery in 1931. He expressed regret that he received little recognition as an artist until the year his mother died and that she was not able to enjoy his success. From the mid-1930s until at least 1939 Lowry took annual holidays at Berwick-upon-Tweed. After the outbreak of war Lowry served as a volunteer fire watcher and became an official war artist in 1943. In 1953 he was appointed Official Artist at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

When his mother died in October 1939 Lowry became depressed and over time, neglected the upkeep of his house to such a degree that the landlord repossessed it in 1948. He was not short of money and bought "The Elms" in Mottram in Longdendale. Although he considered the house ugly and uncomfortable, he stayed there until his death almost 30 years later.^[14]

Personal life[link]

In later years, Lowry spent holidays at the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland, County Durham, painting scenes of the beach and nearby ports and coal mines.^[15] When he had no sketchbook, Lowry drew scenes in pencil or charcoal on the back of envelopes, serviettes (napkins), and cloakroom tickets and presented them to young people sitting with their families. Such serendipitous pieces are now worth thousands of pounds; a serviette sketch can be seen at the Sunderland Mariott Hotel (formerly the Seaburn Hotel).

He was a secretive and mischievous man who enjoyed stories irrespective of their truth.^[16] His friends observed that his anecdotes were more notable for humour than accuracy and in many cases he set out deliberately to deceive. His stories about the fictional Ann were inconsistent and he invented other people as frameworks on which to hang his tales. The collection of clocks in his living room were all set at different times: to some people he said that this was because he did not want to know the real time; to others he claimed that it was to save him from being deafened by their simultaneous chimes.

The contradictions in his life are exacerbated by this confusion. He is widely seen as a shy man, but he had many long-lasting friendships, including the Salford artist Harold Riley, and made new friends throughout his adult life. He bought works from young artists he admired, such as James Lawrence Isherwood whose 'Woman with Black Cat', hung on his studio wall.^[17] He kept ongoing friendships with some of these artists. He befriended the 23-year-old Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell in November 1955, describing her as “the finest landscape artist of the mid-20th century”.^[18] He supported her career by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. Fell later described him as "A great humanist. To be a humanist, one has first to love human beings, and to be a great humanist, one has to be slightly detached from them." As he never married this had an impact on his influence, but he did have several lady friends. At the age of 88 he said that he had "never had a woman".^[19]

As his celebrity grew in the late 1950s, he grew tired of being approached by strangers, and particularly disliked being visited by them at home. Another of his unverifiable stories had him keeping a suitcase by the front door so that he could claim to be just leaving, a practice he claimed to have abandoned after a helpful young man insisted on taking him to the railway station and had to be sent off to buy a paper so that Lowry could buy a ticket for just one stop without revealing his deceit. However, he was polite to the residents of Mottram, who respected him and his privacy; he used the bus to get about the area in his retirement. A bronze statue of him was erected at the traffic lights in the village.

Despite attempts to present himself as a "simple man" and, by default, unable to appreciate post-classical art, Lowry seems to have been aware of major trends in 20th century art. In an interview with Mervyn Levy he expressed his admiration for the work of René Magritte and Lucian Freud, although he admitted that he "didn't understand" Francis Bacon's work. When he started to command large sums for the sale of his works, Lowry purchased a number of paintings and sketches by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of these works were portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris and William Holman Hunt's muse Annie Miller. Lowry considered Rossetti to be his chief inspiration.

Although seen as a mostly solitary and private person, Lowry enjoyed attending football matches and was an ardent supporter of Manchester City Football Club.^[20][21]

Retirement[link]

Lowry retired from the Pall Mall Property Company in 1952 on his 65th birthday (McLean, 1978). He became chief cashier but never stopped collecting rents. The firm supported his development as an artist and allowed time off for exhibitions in addition to his annual leave. It seems that he was not proud of his job; secrecy about his employment by the company is widely seen as a desire to present himself as a serious artist but the secrecy extended beyond the art world into his social circle.

Margery Thompson met him when she was a schoolgirl and he became part of her family circle. He attended concerts with her family and friends, visited her home and entertained her at his Pendlebury home, where he shared his knowledge of painting. They remained friends until his death, but he never told her that he had any work except his art. In the 1950s he visited friends at Cleator Moor in Cumberland (where Geoffrey Bennett was the manager at the National Westminster Bank) and Southampton (where Margery Thompson had moved after her marriage). He painted pictures of the bank in Cleator Moor, Southampton Floating Bridge and other scenes local to his friends' homes.

In 1957 an unrelated 13-year-old schoolgirl called Carol Ann Lowry wrote to him at her mother's urging to ask his advice on becoming an artist. He visited her home in Heywood and befriended the family. His friendship with Carol Ann Lowry lasted for the rest of his life.^[22]

Lowry joked about retiring from the art world, citing his lack of interest in the changing landscape. Instead, he began to focus on groups of figures and odd imaginary characters. Unknown to his friends and the public, Lowry produced a series of erotic works which were not seen until after his death. The paintings depict the mysterious "Ann" figure, who appears in portraits and sketches produced throughout his lifetime, enduring sexually-charged and humiliating tortures. When these works were exhibited at the Art Council's Centenary exhibition at the Barbican in 1988, art critic Richard Dorment wrote in the Daily Telegraph that these works "reveal a sexual anxiety which is never so much as hinted at in the work of the previous 60 years." The group of erotic works, which are sometimes referred to as "the mannequin sketches" or "marionette works" are kept at the Lowry Centre and are available for visitors to see on request. Some are also brought up into the public display area on a rotation system. Manchester author Howard Jacobson has argued that the images are just part of Lowry's melancholy and tortured view of the world and that they would change the public perception of the complexity of his work if they were more widely seen.^[23][24]

Death and legacy[link]

Entrance to the Lowry Centre on Salford Quays

L. S. Lowry memorial at Mottram in Longdendale

Lowry died of pneumonia at the Woods Hospital in Glossop on 23 February 1976 aged 88. He was buried in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, next to his parents. He left estate valued at £298,459, and a considerable number of artworks by himself and others to Carol Ann Lowry, who, in 2001, obtained trademark protection of the artist's signature.

Lowry left a cultural legacy, his works often sold for millions of pounds and inspired other artists. The Lowry in Salford Quays was opened in 2000 at a cost £106million; named after him, the 2,000 square metres (22,000 sq ft) gallery houses 55 of his paintings and 278 drawings – the world's largest collection of his work – with up to 100 on display.^[25] In January 2005, a statue of him was unveiled in Mottram in Longdendale^[26] 100 yards away from his home from 1948 until his death in 1976. The statue has been a target for vandals since it was unveiled.^[27] In 2006 the Lowry Centre in Salford hosted a contemporary dance performance inspired by the works of Lowry.^[28]

Awards and honours[link]

Lowry was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree, by the University of Manchester in 1945, and Doctor of Letters in 1961. He was given the freedom of the city of Salford in 1965. In 1975 he was awarded honorary Doctor of Letters degrees by the Universities of Salford and Liverpool. In 1964, the art world celebrated his 77th birthday with an exhibition of his work and that of 25 contemporary artists who had submitted tributes at Monk's Hall Museum, Eccles. The Hallé Orchestra performed a concert in his honour and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, used Lowry's painting The Pond as his official Christmas card. Lowry's painting Coming Out of School was depicted on a postage stamp of highest denomination in a series issued by the Post Office depicting great British artists in 1968.

Lowry twice declined appointment to the (Order of the British Empire): as an Officer (OBE) in 1955, and as a Commander (CBE) in 1961.^[29] He turned down a knighthood in 1968, and appointments to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 1972 and 1976.^[29] He appears to hold the record for the most honours declined.^[29]

Quotations[link]

On the industrial landscape:

• "We went to Pendlebury in 1909 from a residential side of Manchester, and we didn't like it. My father wanted to go to get near a friend for business reasons. We lived next door, and for a long time my mother never got to like it, and at first I disliked it, and then after about a year or so I got used to it, and then I got absorbed in it, then I got infatuated with it. Then I began to wonder if anyone had ever done it. Seriously, not one or two, but seriously; and it seemed to me by that time that it was a very fine industrial subject matter. And I couldn't see anybody at that time who had done it - and nobody had done it, it seemed."
• "Most of my land and townscape is composite. Made up; part real and part imaginary [...] bits and pieces of my home locality. I don't even know I'm putting them in. They just crop up on their own, like things do in dreams."

On his style:

• "I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me [...] Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic nescessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.
• "I am a simple man, and I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium. That's all I've ever used in my paintings. I like oils [...] I like a medium you can work into over a period of time."

On painting his 'Seascapes':

• "It's the battle of life - the turbulence of the sea [...] I have been fond of the sea all my life, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is. But I often think [...] what if it suddenly changed its mind and didn't turn the tide? And came straight on? If it didn't stay and came on and on and on and on [...] That would be the end of it all."

On art:

• "You don't need brains to be a painter, just feelings."
• "I am not an artist. I am a man who paints."
• "This art is a terrible business."

Works[link]

Lowry's work is held in many public and private collections. The largest collection is held by Salford City Council and displayed at the Lowry Centre. Its collection has about 350 paintings and drawings. X-ray analysis has revealed hidden figures under his drawings - the 'Ann' figures. "Going to the Match" is owned by the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) and is on display at the Lowry Centre.

The Tate Gallery in London owns 23 works. The City of Southampton owns The Floating Bridge, The Canal Bridge and An Industrial Town. His work is featured at MOMA, in New York. The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu in Christchurch, New Zealand has "Factory at Widnes" (1956) in its collection. The painting was one of the gallery’s most important acquisitions of the 1950s and remains the highlight of its collection of modern British art.^[30]

During his life Lowry made about 1,000 paintings and over 8,000 drawings. The lists here are some of those that are considered to be particularly significant.

Selected paintings[link]

• 1906 Still Life
• 1910 Clifton Junction Morning
• 1912 Portrait of the Artist's Mother
• 1917 Coming from the Mill — early example of what has become known as the Lowry style
• 1919 Frank Jopling Fletcher — portrait demonstrating that Lowry's stylisation was a choice and not a consequence of any lack of skill
• 1922 A Manufacturing Town — archetypal Lowry industrial landscape
• 1922 Regent Street, Lytham
• 1925 Self Portrait
• 1926 An Accident
• 1927 Peel Park, Salford — an art gallery and museum that Lowry particularly liked and that held Salford's collection of his work before the opening of The Lowry theatre and gallery complex
• 1927 A View from the Bridge
• 1927 Coming Out of School — the first Lowry painting to be bought by the Tate Gallery by the Lord Duveen Fund
• 1928 A Street Scene — the first Lowry painting to be bought by Salford City Art Gallery
• 1928 Going to the Match
• 1930 Coming from the Mill
• 1934 The Empty House
• 1935 A Fight
• 1935 The Fever Van^[31]
• 1936 Laying a Foundation Stone — the mayor of Swinton and Pendlebury, laying a foundation stone in Clifton^[32]
• 1937 The Lake
• 1938 A Head of a Man
• 1940 The Bedroom – Pendlebury
• 1941 Barges on a Canal
• 1941 Houses on a Hill^[33]
• 1942 The Sea — a mournful painting off the Berwick coast^[34]
• 1942 Blitzed Site
• 1943 Britain at Play — busy urban scene depicting St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park, Manchester
• 1943 Going To Work — painted as a war artist and on show in the Imperial War Museum, London.
• 1945 V.E. Day^[35]
• 1946 The Park
• 1946 Good Friday, Daisy Nook — sold in 2007 for £3.8 million (record price for a Lowry)^[36]
• 1947 A River Bank^[37] — bought in 1951 by Bury Council for £150 and controversially sold in 2006, for £1.25 million at Christie's, by the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, to fund a £10 million budget deficit^[38]
• 1947 Iron Works
• 1947 Cranes and Ships, Glasgow Docks — acquired by Glasgow City Council at Christie's in November 2005 for £198,400, presently on display at the Kelvin Hall, it was bought specifically for display in the new Riverside Museum^[39]
• 1949 The Canal Bridge
• 1949 The Football Match — not seen in public for two decades before May 2011 when offered for sale at Christie's;^[40] later sold for a record £5.6m^[41]
• 1950 The Pond^[42] — the image was used as a Christmas card by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1964
• 1953 Football Ground — fans converging on Bolton Wanderers's old football ground Burnden Park; painted for a competition run by the Football Association, it was later renamed Going to the Match and was bought by the Professional Footballers' Association for a record £1.9 million in 1999.^[43]
• 1955 A Young Man^[44]
• 1955 Industrial Landscape^[45]
• 1956 The Floating Bridge — one of a pair owned by the City of Southampton, where the bridge operated until 1977
• 1956 Factory at Widnes Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand
• 1957 Man Lying on a Wall — note the gentle joke that the man's briefcase bears the initials 'LSL'
• 1957 Portrait of Ann
• 1959 On the Sands
• 1960 Gentleman Looking at Something
• 1961 River Wear at Sunderland
• 1962 Two People
• 1963 The Sea
• 1967 Industrial Scene
• 1967 Tanker Entering the Tyne

Drawings[link]

• 1908 Head from the Antique
• 1914 Seated Male Nude
• 1919 Robert Lowry
• 1920 The Artist's Mother
• 1931 Pendlebury Scene
• 1936 Dewars Lane — Lowry Trail in Berwick^[46]
• 1942 A Bit of Wenlock Edge
• 1956 Berwick Pier and Lighthouse
• 1957 Woman with Beard
• 1958 The Elms — Lowry's house in Mottram-in-Longdendale
• 1961 Colliery, Sunderland
• 1969 The Front, Hartlepool
• undated Palace street Berwick
• undated The Match^[47]

Stolen Lowry works[link]

Five Lowry art works were stolen from the Grove Fine Art Gallery in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire on 2 May 2007. The most valuable were The Viaduct, estimated value of £700,000 and The Tanker Entering the Tyne, which is valued at over £500,000. The Surgery, The Bridge at Ringley and The Street Market were also stolen.^[48]

Tributes[link]

• To mark the centenary of his birth, Royston Futter, director of the L. S. Lowry Centenary Festival on behalf of the City of Salford and the BBC commissioned the Northern Ballet Theatre and Gillian Lynne to create a dance drama in his honour. A Simple Man was choreographed and directed by Lynne, with music by Carl Davis and starred Christopher Gable and Moira Shearer (in her last dance role) and it won a BAFTA award as the best arts programme in 1987. It was subsequently transferred to the stage and first performed in Manchester in 1987 and in London at Sadler's Wells in 1988.
• In February 2011 a bronze statue of Lowry was installed in the basement of his favourite pub, Sam's Chop House.^[49]

In popular culture[link]

• In January 1968 the rock band Status Quo paid tribute to Lowry in their single "Pictures of Matchstick Men" which reached number seven in the British charts, number eight in Canada, and number twelve on the US Billboard Hot 100.
• In 1978, two years after his death, duo Brian and Michael from Manchester, England hit number one in the UK pop charts with their only hit, the Lowry tribute Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. Written by Ancoats-born Michael Coleman and produced by Kevin Parrott, the record sold 750,000 copies.
• In 1980 The Rovers paid tribute to Lowry in song with Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs, which appeared on their album The Rovers and was also the "B" side to their country crossover single "Wasn't That A Party".
• Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian fantasy film Brazil pays homage to Lowry through both the incorporation of 'Lowryesque' cityscapes and the name of its chief protagonist (Sam Lowry).
• The Manchester rock band Oasis paid tribute to Lowry by releasing a music video for the single "The Masterplan" in October 2006 which uses Lowry style animation.
• Burberry designer Christopher Bailey drew influences from Lowry's work for his autumn/winter 2008-09 collection.^[50]
• In August 2010 Figures Half Unreal, an immersive theatre piece on Lowry, was performed in a semi-derelict house in Berwick-upon-Tweed, a town the artist used to visit regularly.^[51]

References[link]

Notes

Bibliography

• Allen Andrews, The Life of L. S. Lowry, A Biography, (London: Jupiter Books, 1977)
• David, McLean. 1978.L. S. Lowry. The Medici Society, London.
• Hilda Margery Clarke, Lowry Himself, (Southampton: The First Gallery, 1992) ISBN 0-9512947-0-9
• Michael Howard, Lowry — A Visionary Artist (Lausanne, Switzerland: Acatos, 1999)
• Michael Leber & Judith Sandling (editors), L. S. Lowry, (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987)
• Michael Leber & Judith Sandling, Lowry's City: A Painter and His Locale, (London: Lowry House, 2001)
• Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L. S. Lowry: Oils and Watercolours, (London: Jupiter Books, 1975)
• Mervyn Levy, The Drawings of L. S. Lowry: Public and Private, (London: Jupiter Books, 1976)
• Tilly Marshall, Life with Lowry, (London: Hutchinson, 1981) ISBN 0-09-144090-4
• Shelley Rohde, A Private View of L. S. Lowry, (London: Collins, 1979)
• Shelley Rohde, The Lowry Lexicon — An A–Z of L. S. Lowry, (Salford Quays: Lowry Press, 1999)
• Doreen Sieja, The Lowry I Knew, (London: Jupiter Books, 1983)
• Julian Spalding, Lowry, (Oxford: Phaidon, New York: Dutton, 1979)
• H. W. Timperley, (ill. L. S. Lowry), A Cotswold Book, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931)

External links[link]

• Examples of Lowry's work on people and places from the The Lowry website

• Media related to L. S. Lowry at Wikimedia Commons

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L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp
Born	(1907-11-27)November 27, 1907 New York City, New York
Died	November 6, 2000(2000-11-06) (aged 92) Plano, Texas
Pen name	Lyman R. Lyon
Occupation	Novelist, short story author, essayist, historian
Genres	Science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, historical fiction, history
Influenced Christopher Stasheff, Harry Turtledove, Lin Carter, David Drake
www.lspraguedecamp.com

Lyon Sprague de Camp (November 27, 1907 – November 6, 2000) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, non-fiction and biography. In a writing career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and notable works of non-fiction, including biographies of other important fantasy authors. He "was widely regarded as an imaginative and innovative writer and was an important figure in the heyday of science fiction, from the late 1930's through the late 1940's."^[1]

Life[link]

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.^[2] 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."^[3]

An aeronautical engineer by profession, De Camp earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1930, and 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.^[1]

In 1939, de Camp married Catherine Crook, with whom he later collaborated on works of science fiction and nonfiction beginning in the 1960s.^[1]

L. Sprague de Camp (center) with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov

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".^[4]

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.^[5]

Works[link]

De Camp was a materialist who wrote works examining society, history, technology and myth. He published numerous short stories, novels, non-fiction works and poems during his long career.

De Camp had the mind of an educator, and a common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. A highly rational and logical thinker, he was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings. Thus, his response to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was to write a similar time travel novel (Lest Darkness Fall) in which the method of time travel was rationalized and the hero's technical expertise both set at a believable level and constrained by the technological limitations of the age.

In like fashion, he reimagined space opera and planetary romance in his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, and the prehistoric precursor civilizations characteristic of much heroic fantasy in his "Pusadian series". When he was not debunking literary conventions he was often explaining them, as with the early "Harold Shea" stories co-written with Fletcher Pratt, in which the magical premises behind a number of bodies of myths and legends were accepted as a given but examined and elucidated in terms of their own systems of inherent logic. De Camp's explanatory tendency also carried over into his non-fictional writings.

Science fiction[link]

De Camp's science fiction is marked by his interests in linguistics, historical forces,^{[citation needed]} and the history and philosophy of science.^[6] His first published story was "The Isolinguals", in the September 1937 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Most of his early science fiction stories were unrelated to each other, the exceptions being his "Johnny Black" tales about a black bear uplifted to human-level intelligence, and his "Drinkwhiskey Institute" stories, a series of tall tales involving time travel.

De Camp's most highly regarded works in the genre are his time travel and alternate history stories, including Lest Darkness Fall (1939), "The Wheels of If" (1940), "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956), "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958), and The Glory That Was (1960) – in the last of which the "time travel" actually turns out to be a tour de force of historical recreation. Lest Darkness Fall, "The Wheels of If" and "Aristotle and the Gun" have been recognized as seminal works in the field of alternate history.^[7]

His most extended work was his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, set in a future where Brazil is the dominant power, particularly a subseries of sword and planet novels set on the planet Krishna, beginning with The Queen of Zamba.^[6] His most influential Viagens novel was the non-Krishna work Rogue Queen, a tale of a hive society undermined by interstellar contact, which was one of the earliest science fiction novels to deal with sexual themes.

De Camp wrote a number of lesser-known but nonetheless significant works that explored such topics as racism, which he considered to be more accurately described as ethnocentrism. He pointed out that no scholar comparing the merits of various ethnicities has ever sought to prove that his own ethnicity was inferior to others.^[8]

Fantasy[link]

De Camp was best known for his light fantasy, particularly the "Harold Shea" series and "Gavagan's Bar" series, both written in collaboration with his longtime friend Fletcher Pratt. The pair also wrote a number of stand-alone novels similar in tone to the Harold Shea stories, of which the most highly regarded is Land of Unreason. De Camp also produced a few more of this genre on his own.

He was also known for his sword and sorcery, a fantasy genre he was instrumental in reviving through his editorial work on and continuation of Robert E. Howard's "Conan" cycle.^[1] He also edited a series of early fantasy anthologies credited with helping to spark the renaissance of heroic fantasy in the late 1960s.^[9]

De Camp wrote three sword and sorcery sequences of note. The early "Pusadian series", composed of the novel The Tritonian Ring and several short stories, are set in an antediluvian era similar to Howard's.

More substantial is the later "Novarian series", of which the core is the Reluctant King trilogy, beginning with The Goblin Tower, de Camp's most accomplished effort in the genre. The trilogy features the adventurer Jorian, ex-king of Xylar. Jorian's world is an alternate reality to which our own serves as an afterlife. Other novels in the sequence include The Fallible Fiend, a satire told from the point of view of a demon, and The Honorable Barbarian, a follow-up to the trilogy featuring Jorian's brother as the hero.

A late third series, composed of The Incorporated Knight and The Pixilated Peeress, is set in the medieval era of another alternate world sharing the geography of our own, but in which a Neapolitan empire filled the role of Rome and no universal religion like Christianity ever arose, leaving its nations split among competing pagan sects. The setting is borrowed in part from Mandeville's Travels.

Historical fiction[link]

De Camp also wrote historical fiction, set in the era of classical antiquity from the height of the Persian Empire to the waning of the Hellenistic period, which forms a loosely-connected series based on their common setting and occasional cross references. They were also linked by a common focus on the advancement of scientific knowledge, de Camp's chosen protagonists being explorers, artisans, engineers, innovators and practical philosophers rather than famous names from antiquity, who are relegated to secondary roles. The best known of his historical novels is The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate.

Nonfiction[link]

De Camp enjoyed debunking doubtful history and pseudoscientific claims of the supernatural, and explaining how ancient civilizations produced structures and architecture thought by some to be beyond the technologies of their time, such as the Pyramids of Ancient Egypt. Works in this area include Lost Continents, Citadels of Mystery, and The Ancient Engineers.

Among his many other wide-ranging non-fiction works were The Great Monkey Trial (about the Scopes Trial), The Ragged Edge of Science, Energy and Power, The Heroic Age of American Invention, The Day of the Dinosaur (which argued, among other things, that evolution took hold after Darwin because of the Victorian interest spurred by recently popularized dinosaur remains, corresponding to legends of dragons), and The Evolution of Naval Weapons (a U.S. government textbook).

The author also wrote pioneering biographies of many key fantasy writers, most as short articles, but two as full-length studies of the prominent authors Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, the first major independent biographies of both writers. De Camp's "warts and all" approach to his subjects has been branded by some fans as unflattering and unbalanced. For instance, Mark Finn, author of Blood and Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, contends that de Camp deliberately framed his questions in regard to Howard to elicit answers matching his Freudian theories about him.^[10]

Awards and honors[link]

Together with his collaborator Willy Ley, de Camp won the 1953 International Fantasy Award for nonfiction for their Lands Beyond, their study of geographical myths.^[6][11] De Camp was guest of honor at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention.^[1] In 1976, he received the World Science Fiction Society's Gandalf Grand Master award for lifetime achievement in fantasy writing; he was designated a SFWA Grandmaster in 1979.^[1] He won a World Fantasy Convention award in 1984, ^[1] the first Sidewise Award for Alternate History Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994,^[7] and a Hugo Award in 1997 for his autobiography, Time and Chance.^[1]

Selective bibliography[link]

The most significant of de Camp's works as published in book form include the following:

Science fiction[link]

• Lest Darkness Fall (1939) - an early alternate history novel that helped define the genre
• The Wheels of If and Other Science Fiction (1948) - early collection of de Camp's short fiction, including "The Wheels of If"
• Genus Homo (1950) (with P. Schuyler Miller) - first science fiction novel de Camp had a hand in, possibly the earliest work of fiction dealing with the "Planet of the Apes" theme
• The Hand of Zei (1950) - the best of the early Krishna novels
• Rogue Queen (1951) - one of the earliest science fiction novels to deal with sexual themes
• The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens (1953) - collection of most of the shorter works in the Viagens Interplanetarias series
• The Virgin of Zesh (1953) - Krishna novel noted for the early use (for science fiction) of a strong female protagonist and a possible influence on Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon
• The Glory That Was (1960) - a tour de force incorporating most of de Camp's major interests into one work
• A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales (1963) - collection of some of the best of de Camp's early fiction, including "A Gun for Dinosaur" and "Aristotle and the Gun"
• The Best of L. Sprague de Camp (1978) - a mid-career review collecting de Camp's best short works

Fantasy[link]

• The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) (with Fletcher Pratt) - first of the de Camp/Pratt collaborations, including the earliest Harold Shea stories
• Land of Unreason (1942) (with Fletcher Pratt) - best of the non-series de Camp/Pratt collaborations
• The Undesired Princess (1951) - earliest of de Camp's major fantasies not written in collaboration with Pratt; set in an Aristotelian universe
• Tales from Gavagan's Bar (1953, exp. 1978) (with Fletcher Pratt) - collected edition of de Camp and Pratt's second major fantasy series
• The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (1953) - collection of the earlier works in the Pusadian series, including The Tritonian Ring
• Tales of Conan (1955) (with Robert E. Howard) - collection containing the first of de Camp's "posthumous collaborations" with Howard, marking the beginning of his successful promotion of Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" character
• Conan the Adventurer (1966) (with Robert E. Howard) - first of the paperback printings of the Howard/de Camp "Conan" collaborations, which ensured the success of the character and defined it for a generation
• The Goblin Tower (1968) - first of the Novarian series
• The Fallible Fiend (1973) - offbeat entry in the Novarian series presenting a satirical look at humanity through the eyes of a demon

Other[link]

• The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (1961) - the first (chronologically) of de Camp's historical novels
• Swords and Sorcery (1963) - pioneering sword and sorcery anthology, the first ever published

Nonfiction[link]

• Inventions and Their Management (1937; vt. Inventions, Patents, and Their Management (1959)) (with Alf K. Berle) - de Camp's first work of nonfiction
• Lands Beyond (1952) (with Willy Ley) - a comprehensive survey of geographical myths
• Science-Fiction Handbook (1953 (revised 1975, with Catherine Crook de Camp)) - an influential early writers' guide
• Lost Continents; the Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature (1954) - the title says it all
• The Ancient Engineers (1963) - an exhaustive account of practical science through the ages prior to the modern era
• The Great Monkey Trial (1968) - the definitive popular account of the Scopes Trial
• Lovecraft: a Biography (1975) - the first major biography of H. P. Lovecraft
• Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976) - a major contribution to the historical study of modern fantasy authors
• Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard (1983) (with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin) - the first major biography of Robert E. Howard
• Time and Chance: an Autobiography (1996) - winner of the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book

Notes[link]

Listen to[link]

• A Gun for Dinosaur on X Minus One, NBC radio, 1956

External links[link]

• Official L. Sprague de Camp website
• Yahoo Discussion Group for de Camp fans
• L. Sprague de Camp at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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