Fritz Leiber was a major American writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and sword-and-sorcery fiction, admired for his range, intelligence, wit, and stylistic control. The son of Shakespearean actors, Leiber brought theatrical awareness, literary sophistication, and psychological subtlety to popular fiction. He wrote across the major speculative genres with equal confidence, producing urban horror, satirical science fiction, supernatural fiction, and heroic fantasy that helped shape the field.Leiber is especially famous for creating Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, one of the defining partnerships in sword-and-sorcery fiction, but his science fiction and horror are equally important. Works such as Gather, Darkness!, The Big Time, Conjure Wife, Our Lady of Darkness, and numerous magazine stories reveal a writer fascinated by power, performance, fear, society, and the unstable boundary between the rational and the uncanny. His fiction won multiple major genre awards and continues to stand as one of the central achievements of twentieth-century speculative literature.