# Lin Carter - Maker: Novelist - Date: 1930–1988 - Houses: Ballantine Books, Ace Books - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lin-carter/ > The fan-turned-editor who, as curator of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, rescued Dunsany, Morris and Clark Ashton Smith from obscurity and built the first paperback canon of fantasy. **Why it matters:** Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1969–74) gave the post-Tolkien boom a history, and his World's End novels landed on Gary Gygax's Appendix N reading list for Dungeons & Dragons. ## Quick answers **Who was Lin Carter?** The fan-turned-editor who, as curator of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, rescued Dunsany, Morris and Clark Ashton Smith from obscurity and built the first paperback canon of fantasy. **When was Lin Carter born?** Lin Carter was born in 1930 in St. Petersburg, Florida and died in 1988. **What is Lin Carter known for?** Lin Carter is best known for Conan the Cimmerian. **Why does Lin Carter matter to fantasy and games?** Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1969–74) gave the post-Tolkien boom a history, and his World's End novels landed on Gary Gygax's Appendix N reading list for Dungeons & Dragons. ## Life Linwood Vrooman Carter was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, on June 9, 1930, and grew up reading the pulps so voraciously that his letters were appearing in *Startling Stories* by 1943. He served as an infantryman in Korea from 1951 to 1953, studied at Columbia University, where he sat in Leonie Adams's poetry workshop, and then spent more than a decade as an advertising and publishers' copywriter in New York. Only in 1969 did he go full-time as a writer, by which point he already had a shelf of paperbacks to his name. Carter was a clubbable, enthusiastic presence in fandom. He belonged to the Trap Door Spiders, the literary dining club that Isaac Asimov fictionalized as the Black Widowers (Carter was the model for the character Mario Gonzalo), and to SAGA, the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose fraternity of heroic-fantasy writers. His closest literary partner was L. Sprague de Camp, who critiqued his early manuscripts and later co-wrote with him, though the two fell out in Carter's final decade. His later years were hard. Heavy drinking and smoking preceded a diagnosis of oral cancer in 1985; surgery, obtained through his veteran's benefits, left him disfigured. He was nonetheless returning to print in 1987–88 with new novels and a column for the Lovecraftian fanzine *Crypt of Cthulhu*. He died in Montclair, New Jersey, on February 7, 1988, after a heart attack brought on by emphysema-related breathing failure. ## Work As a novelist Carter was prolific and frankly imitative, averaging about six books a year in the late 1960s and usually naming his models in his own introductions. *The Wizard of Lemuria* (Ace, 1965), the first of his Thongor books, wore its debt to [Robert E. Howard](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/robert-e-howard/) openly; the Callisto and Zanthodon series tipped their hats to Edgar Rice Burroughs; the Simrana stories imitated [Lord Dunsany](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/lord-dunsany/); and a long run of Cthulhu Mythos tales extended the cosmos of [H. P. Lovecraft](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/h-p-lovecraft/). With de Camp he produced pastiches and completions of Howard's [Conan](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/conan-the-cimmerian/) stories for the Lancer and Ace paperbacks, the editions whose [Frank Frazetta](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/frank-frazetta/) covers defined the look of [Sword & Sorcery](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/sword-and-sorcery/) for a generation. He also wrote "posthumous collaborations" built on fragments left by [Clark Ashton Smith](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/clark-ashton-smith/). Critics have rarely been kind: David Pringle dismissed much of the fiction as derivative, while granting that Carter was "enormously influential as an editor." That influence came through [Ballantine Books](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/ballantine-books/). From 1969 to 1974 Carter selected and introduced the titles of the [The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/ballantine-adult-fantasy/) series, a line created to feed readers who had devoured [The Lord of the Rings](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-lord-of-the-rings/) and wanted more. He brought back into print authors who had been out of reach for decades, among them Dunsany, [William Morris](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/william-morris/), Smith, James Branch Cabell, Hope Mirrlees, and Evangeline Walton, whose retellings of the [Mabinogion](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/the-mabinogion/) found a new audience. He also helped newcomers such as Katherine Kurtz and Joy Chant into print. The editor David G. Hartwell judged that the series brought "nearly all the adult fantasy stories and novels worth reading" into mass editions. Carter also tried to write the genre's history. *Tolkien: A Look Behind "The Lord of the Rings"* (1969) was one of the first book-length studies of [Tolkien](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/j-r-r-tolkien/), and *Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy* (1973) traced a lineage from Morris through [E. R. Eddison](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/e-r-eddison/) and Dunsany to the moderns. Peter S. Beagle and others faulted its errors, but it gave fans a map where none had existed. He edited the *Flashing Swords!* anthologies (1973–81), the first six volumes of DAW's *The Year's Best Fantasy Stories* (1975–80), and a paperback revival of [Weird Tales](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/weird-tales/) (1981–83). ## Legacy Carter's fiction sits in the second rank, but his fingerprints are all over the first. When [Gary Gygax](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/gary-gygax/) listed the books behind [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/advanced-dungeons-and-dragons/) in [Appendix N](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/appendix-n/) of the 1979 *Dungeon Masters Guide*, Carter's World's End series, beginning with *Giant of World's End* (1969), was on it: a far-future [Dying Earth](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/dying-earth/) romp in the vein of [Jack Vance](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jack-vance/). More importantly, many of the older writers on that list reached 1970s gamers because Carter and his peers had put them back on paperback racks. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy line is now remembered as the moment fantasy acquired a canon, a shelf of ancestors stretching back behind Tolkien. It prepared the ground for the boom that Ballantine's own [Del Rey](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/del-rey-books/) imprint would ride from 1977. With SAGA, Carter also sponsored the Gandalf Award, fantasy's first answer to the Hugo, which ran from 1974 to 1981 before being eclipsed by the [World Fantasy Awards](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/world-fantasy-convention/). Wildside Press began returning his fiction to print in 1999, and his papers are held at Ohio State University and Duke University. ## Facts - His first published novel, The Wizard of Lemuria (Ace, 1965), was the seventh he had written and launched his Conan-like hero Thongor. - He edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line from 1969 to 1974, reviving Lord Dunsany, William Morris, Clark Ashton Smith, James Branch Cabell and Hope Mirrlees. - Gary Gygax's Appendix N (1979) cites exactly one Carter work: the World's End series, a dying-earth saga set on the supercontinent Gondwane. - Isaac Asimov modeled Mario Gonzalo of his Black Widowers mysteries on Carter, a fellow member of the Trap Door Spiders dining club. - In 1968–69 he was a principal writer on the fantasy-heavy second season of ABC's original Spider-Man cartoon. - With SAGA, the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, he sponsored the Gandalf Award, presented at Worldcon from 1974 to 1981. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Carter) - [The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/carter_lin) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.