The Fantasy Hall of Fame [22 stories]
Contains:
[The masque of the red death](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL41050W) / Edgar Allan Poe --	
[Inhabitant of Carcosa](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7973249W/An_Inhabitant_of_Carcosa) / Ambrose Bierce --	
The sword of Welleran / Lord Dunsany --	
The women of the wood / A. Merritt --	
The weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan / Clark Ashton Smith --	
The valley of the worm / Robert E. Howard --	
Black god's kiss / C.L. Moore --	
The silver key / H.P. Lovecraft --	
Nothing in the rules / L. Sprague De Camp --	
A gnome there was / Henry Kuttner --	
Snulbug / Anthony Boucher --	
The words of Guru / C.M. Kornbluth --	
Homecoming / Ray Bradbury --	
Mazirian the magician / Jack Vance --	
O ugly bird! / Manly Wade Wellman --
The silken swift / Theodore Sturgeon --	
The golem / Avram Davidson --	
That hell-bound train / Robert Bloch --	
Kings in Darkness / Michael Moorcok --	
Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes / Harlan Ellison --	
Gonna roll the bones / Fritz Leiber --	
The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin.
abbeys, American horror tales, Children's fiction, daggers, Fiction
Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, L. Sprague De Camp, Henry Kuttner, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, Avram Davidson, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin
Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for his novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from Yeats' poem; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another; and in 2004 he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

([Source][1])


  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Silverberg || Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941 – June 25, 2011) was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and business partner of Isaac Asimov. || Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.[1] He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.[2]

Source and more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe || Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. || Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was born in Ireland, the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany and Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax. He spent his childhood at several family properties, including Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, Dunsany Castle in County Meath, as wells as other family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton and finally Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. He became the 18th Baron of Dunsany when his father died in 1899, and he returned to Dunsany Castle in 1901 after war duty. He married Lady Beatrice Child Villiers in 1904. Their child, Randal, was born in 1906.

Edward Plunkett was a writer and dramatist, notable for his work, mostly in fantasy, which he published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays. || Abraham Grace Merritt was born in Beverly, New Jersey. In 1894, he moved with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He worked to become a lawyer, but instead became a journalist. In 1912 he became assistant editor of The American Weekly until 1937, when he became its editor. He also wrote fiction, including eight novels. || Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures".

Smith was one of "the big three of *Weird Tales*, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft", but some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse." Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.

Of his writing style, Smith stated: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation." 

**Source**: [Clark Ashton Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith) on Wikipedia. || Catherine Lucille Moore || Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. 
After his father's institutionalization in 1893, he lived affluently until his family's wealth dissipated after the death of his grandfather. He then lived with his mother, in reduced financial security, until her institutionalization in 1919. He began to write essays for the United Amateur Press Association, and in 1913 wrote a critical letter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction. He became active in the speculative fiction community and was published in several pulp magazines. Lovecraft moved to New York City, marrying Sonia Greene in 1924, and later became the center of a wider group of authors known as the "Lovecraft Circle". They introduced him to Weird Tales, which would become his most prominent publisher. Lovecraft's time in New York took a toll on his mental state and financial conditions. He returned to Providence in 1926 and produced some of his most popular works, including *The Call of Cthulhu*, *At the Mountains of Madness*, *The Shadow over Innsmouth* and *The Shadow Out of Time*. 
He would remain active as a writer for 11 more years until his death from intestinal cancer at the age of 46. 

From Wikipedia. || Lyon Sprague de Camp — known as L. Sprague de Camp — was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction and biography. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of non-fiction, including biographies of other fantasy authors. - Wikipedia || Henry Kuttner was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. || Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative. 

Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, *The Martian Chronicles*, *The Illustrated Man*, *Fahrenheit 451* and *Something Wicked This Way Comes*, are masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime. His timeless, constant appeal to audiences young and old has proven him to be one of the truly classic authors of the 20th Century -- and the 21st. 

In recognition of his stature in the world of literature and the impact he has had on so many for so many years, Bradbury was awarded the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an the National Medal of Arts in 2004. 

([Source][1])


  [1]: http://www.raybradbury.com/about.html || Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy stories. || Avram Davidson was born in Yonkers, New York.  He was educated in public schools, then studied anthropology at New York University before joining the U.S. Navy in 1942.   He served as a hospital corpsman (medic), first with the Naval Air Corps, and then with the Fifth Marines.  After the war, he travelled in England, Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean before returning the the U.S. to resume his education.  He continued his education at several schools, but never earned a degree.  In 1950 he returned to the U.S. to study at an agricultural school, then went to Israel to become a shepherd.  He returned to New York City shortly after and began his writing career as a Talmudic scholar, publishing short stories and several essays in Orthodox Jewish Life beginning in 1949 and in Commentary beginning in 1952, under the name A. A. Davidson.  He was very active in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City during this period.  His first published science fiction story, "My Boy Friend's Name is Jello," appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1954.  In 1961 he met Grania Kaiman, and they were married in early 1962, and had a son in November 1962.  He became editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1962-1965.  In 1963 he and his family moved to Milford, Pennsylvania, but had several disagreements with their landlord which resulted in them being evicted, so they moved to Amecameca, Mexico.  In June 1964, Grania moved back to California, while Avram stayed in Mexico with their son.  In 1965, he relocated to British Honduras (now Belize), then to California in 1970, where he began to study and then converted to Tenrikyo, a panentheist Japanese New Religion.  In 1971 he moved to Sausalito, California, close to San Francisco.  In his later years, he lived in Bremerton, Washington, where he died in 1993, aged 70.

Over the course of his writing career, he wrote 20 novels and collaborated on several more, but he was best known for his short science fiction stories.  He was recognized with a Hugo Award, a World Fantasy Award (including the prestigious Life Achievement Award), and an Edgar Award.  He was survived by his his ex-wife Grania Davis, who continues to edit and release his unpublished works. || Robert Albert Bloch was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of German-Jewish Americans.  During the 1930s, he was an avid reader of Weird Tales magazine and H. P. Lovecraft in particular.  He wrote to Lovecraft, who responded with advice on writing, and Bloch sold his first published short story, "The Feast in the Abbey" to Weird Tales when he was just seventeen.  He continued to write for Weird Tales and went on to become one of its most popular authors, while also contributing to other magazines.  In 1946, his first published novel, The Scarf, was released.  He received the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1959 for “That Hell-Bound Train” (1958).  Also in 1959, he published one of his best-known novels, Psycho, which was adapted for the screen in 1960 by Joseph Stefano, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  He wrote the screenplay for the movie The Night Walker (1964), and he also wrote three scripts for the television show Star Trek.  Over the course of his career, he wrote hundreds of short stories and over twenty novels, mostly in the crime fiction, science fiction and, horror fiction genres. || Harlan Ellison was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a Jewish-American family.  His family moved to Painesville, Ohio, but returned to Cleveland in 1949 after the death of his father.  As a child, he performed in minstrel shows, and frequently ran away from home, taking odd jobs.  He attended Ohio State University but was expelled after 18 months for hitting a professor who had denigrated his writing ability.  He moved to New York City in 1955 to become a science fiction writer.  Over the next two years, he published more than 100 short stories and articles.  In 1957, he joined a street gang in Brooklyn as research for his novel Web of the City/Rumble and short story collection The Deadly Streets.  In the late 1950s, he wrote erotic fiction under the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird.  Later, he used the pseudonym for works that he felt were warped beyond his original intention by editors or producers.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1957 and returned to New York in 1960, before moving to Chicago, to write for Rogue magazine and work as an editor for Regency Books.  In 1962, he moved to California and began writing for Hollywood film studios in.  His first screenplay was for the film The Oscar.  He also wrote scripts for television shows such as The Flying Nun, Burke's Law, Route 66, The Outer Limits, Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Cimarron Strip.  
During the late 1960s, he also wrote a column about political and social issues in television for the Los Angeles Free Press titled "The Glass Teat."

Ellison has won ten Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, and five Bram Stoker Awards (presented by the Horror Writers Association) including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.  He has written nine novels, hundreds of short stories, and many articles and essays.  He continues to write from his home in Los Angeles, California with Susan, his fifth wife. || Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having coined the term. 

**Source**: [Fritz Leiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Leiber) on Wikipedia. || "As of 2010, Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include a volume of poetry, Incredible Good Fortune, the novel Lavinia, and an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl. She lives in Portland, Oregon." - [source][1]


  [1]: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Biography-70Word.html