Life
Fallowing serving within Korea, he attended Columbia University. He was the copywriter for a bit of years prior to writing good-whale. He was married when you took section of his writing career, however a marriage finally failed.

As an creator, he was a member of the tons-male literary feasting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as a basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional class action of mystery problem solver a Black Widowers. Carter himself was a model for the Mario Gonzalo character.

He was as well the member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit class action Heroic Fantasy authors, some of whose function he anthologized in the Flashing Swords! series.

Carter is virtually all closely associated by owning fellow author L. Sprague de Camp, who served as a mentor and collaborator and was a fellow member of both the Trap Door Spiders and SAGA.

The chain smoker, Carter developed cancer in the mouth in late life & experienced to last disfiguring surgery to keep around it flushed. Never really eradicated, a disease later spread to his throat, leading to his demise around 1988.

Carter as Author
Carter is better known for planetary romances and heroic fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. His earliest promulgated novel, A Wizard of Lemuria, foremost of the sword and sorcery "Thongor the Barbarian" series, combines each influences. His better known series, a "Callisto" & "Zanthondon" books, come straight tributes to Burroughs' Barsoom series and Pellucidar novels, respectively. With L. Sprague de Camp, he compiled several books of Howard's Conan tales; finishing and extending many of them, and also writing pastiche novels and short stories.

More works of Carter's pay court to the styles of contemporary pulp magazine authors or their precursors, including Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft (in various short stories), Clark Ashton Smith (in his "Green Star" novels), Leigh Brackett (in his "Mysteries of Mars" series) and Kenneth Robeson (in his "Prince Zarkon" books). Late around his career he assimulated influences from either mythology and fairy tales, and potentially branched retired briefly into pornographic fantasy.

Carter claimed to exist as working in an epos literary fantasy entitled Khymyrium. At least iii extract were published when separate stories ("Azlon" & "The Mantichore" within 1969 and "The Sword of Power" inside 1971). A complete novel never appeared, although Carter continued to produce claims for its excellence throughout his lifespan.

Carter as Editor and Critic
When his fiction was typically derivitive, Carter was influential as a pioneering historiographer of fantasy, whose early studies of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft were followed up by the wide-ranging Imaginary Worlds, a study tracing the emergence and development of modern fantasy from the late nineteenth century novels of William Morris through the 1970s. The tendency toward self-promotion within his non-nonfictional prose doesn't detract from either its importance.

Carter was as well a fantasy anthologist of note (the Flashing Swords series), &, as an editor for Ballantine Books, brought several obscure eventually crucial books of fantasy back into print under a "Adult Fantasy" line, including works by Dunsany, Morris, Smith, James Branch Cabell, and Evangeline Walton, when well as helping recently authors break into a field, like Katherine Kurtz. He too edited the total of freshly anthologies of classic & contemporary fantasy. Late he went in to edit a number one six volumes of the Season's Right Fantasy series for DAW Books.

Posthumous Revival

Wildside Press began an extensive program returning tremendously of Carter's fiction to print within 1999.

Bibliography

Novels

Callisto
Jandar of Callisto (1972) Black Legion of Callisto (1972) Sky Pirates of Callisto (1973) Mad Empress of Callisto (1975) Mind Wizards of Callisto (1975) Lankar of Callisto (1975) Ylana of Callisto (1977) Renegade of Callisto (1978) Callisto Volume 1 (2000)

The Chronicles of Kylix
The Quest of the Kadji (1971) The Wizard of Zao (1978) Kellory the Warlock (1984)

Gondwane
The Warrior of World's End (1974) The Enchantress of World's End (1975) The Immortal of World's End (1976) The Barbarian of World's End (1977) The Pirate of World's End (1978) Giant of World's End (1969)

The Green Star
Under the Green Star (1972) When the Green Star Calls (1973) By the Light of the Green Star (1974) As the Green Star Rises (1975) In the Green Star's Glow (1976)

Hautley Quicksilver
The Thief of Thoth (1968) The Purloined Planet (1969)

The History of the Great Imperium
Outworlder (1971) The Man Without a Planet (1966) Star Rogue (1970)

The Mysteries of Mars
The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974) The City Outside the World (1977) Down to a Sunless Sea (1984) The Man Who Loved Mars (1973)

Terra Magica
Kesrick (1982) Dragonrouge: An Adult Fantasy (1984) Mandrigardo (1987) Callipygia (1988)

Thongor
The Wizard of Lemuria (1965) Thongor and The Wizard of Lemuria (1969) [exp. of The Wizard of Lemuria] Thongor of Lemuria (1966) Thongor and the Dragon City (1970) [exp. of Thongor of Lemuria] Thongor Against the Gods (1967) Thongor in the City of Magicians (1968) Thongor at the End of Time (1968) Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus (1970)

Zanthodon
Journey to the Underground World (1979) Zanthodon (1980) Hurok of the Stone Age (1981) Darya of the Bronze Age (1981) Eric of Zanthodon (1982)

Zarkon-Lord of the Unknown
The Nemesis of Evil (1975) Invisible Death (1975) The Volcano Ogre (1976) The Earth-Shaker (1982) Horror Wears Blue (1987)

Other works
The Black Star (1973) The Flame of Iridar (1967) Found Wanting (1985) Lost World of Time (1969) The Star Magicians (1966) Tara of the Twilight (1979) Time War (1974) Tower at the Edge of Time (1968) Tower of the Medusa (1969)

Collections
Beyond the Gates of Dream (1969) Dreams from R'lyeh (Arkham, 1975) [poetry] Lost Worlds (1980) Xothic: The Selected Fiction of Lin Carter (1997)

Collaborations
Conan (1967) (with Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague diamond state Camp) Destination Saturn (1967) (with Donald Wollheim writing when David Grinnell) King Kull (1967) (Robert E. Howard) [= Kull] Conan of the Isles (1968) (with L. Sprague delaware Camp) Conan the Wanderer (1968) (with Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague first state Camp) [O/N+ Conan the Adventurer (Howard & de Camp) + Conan the Buccaneer (Carter & de Camp);= The Conan Chronicles 2 (1990)] Conan of Cimmeria (1969) (with Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague first state Camp) [O/2N+ Conan the Freebooter (Howard & de Camp);= The Conan Chronicles (1989)] Conan the Buccaneer (1971) (with L. Sprague first state Camp) Conan of Aquilonia (1977) (with L. Sprague delaware Camp) Conan the Swordsman (1978) (with L. Sprgue diamond state Camp & Bjorn Nyberg) Conan the Liberator (1979) (with L. Sprague delaware Camp) Conan the Barbarian (1982) (with L. Sprague delaware Camp) Sagas of Conan (2004) (with L. Sprgue diamond state Camp & Bjorn Nyberg)

Non-fiction
Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (1969) (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (1972) (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy (1973) (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Middle Earth: The World of Tolkien Illustrated (text by Carter, paintings by Joan Wyatt, 1977)

Edited
Discoveries in Fantasy, 1972 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Dragons, Elves and Heroes, 1969 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Flashing Swords! #1, 1973 Flashing Steel! #2, 1973 Flashing Steel! #3: Warriors & Wizards, 1976 Flashing Blade! #4: Barbarians & Nigrify Magicians, 1977 Flashing Blade! #5: Demons & Daggers, 1977 Golden Cities, Far, 1970 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy I, 1972 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Great Short Novels of Full-grown Fantasy Two, 1973 (Ballantine Grown Fantasy) Kingdoms of Sorcery (1976) The Magic of Atlantis (1970) New Worlds for Old, 1971 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Realms of Wizardry (1976) The Spawn of Cthulhu, 1971 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) The Young Magicians, 1969 (Ballantine Adult Fantasy) Weird Tales: 1 (1981) Weird Tales: Two (1981) Weird Tales: Ternion (1981) Weird Tales: Foursome (1983) The Year's Best Fantasy Stories (1975) The Season's Right Fantasy Stories: Deuce (1976) The Month's Right Fantasy Stories: Deuce-ace (1977) The Month's Right Fantasy Stories: Quatern (1978) The Season's Right Fantasy Stories: Pentad (1980) The Month's Right Fantasy Stories: Sestet (1980)