D&D's Origins in Gothic Literature

[chirine ba kal]

If you wanted an example of a direct literary influence on the creation of D & D, try Fritz Leiber, Jr. and his Quarmall short story (with Harry Fischer), which both Dave and Gary told me that they had read. I think it's even mentioned in the literature, too.

Interesting, I dont think we had any specific conformation of Dave being into Fritz Leiber before. I guessed this was more of a Gary thing.

Don't forget that back then there really weren't that many decent sources of mainstream fantasy literature. If you went to a bookstore, the "scifi/fantasy" section was very limited and composed of a few authors like Tolkien, Leiber, Howard, and Moorcock (it wasn't until the mid-1970's when Brooks' Shannara took off that we got such a huge influx of books) so it doesn't surprise me at all that Dave would have read all of the big names at the time.

Back in those days, as the poster notes, we all read pretty much the same authors - Blish, Heinlein, Anderson, Dickson, Leiber, Simak, Kornbluth, Howard, Burroughs, Asimov, Lovecraft, "Doc" Smith, Merritt, and even that young lady who told stories to the Caliph every night for a thousand nights.

We didn't have what you call 'bookstores', until Uncle Hugo's opened; we had 'mail order', where the books arrived in plain brown paper wrappers so that the neighbors wouldn't know that we were reading that 'Skiffy' trash. I wonder - does anyone still read that old-timey stuff anymore? If you want to go looking for Dave (and Gary and Phil, for that matter) try looking there in those musty pages; they were there, reading and dreaming, back in the day when those pages were crisp and new...

- chirine