Andre Norton

I read a number of her works when I was younger, and still have a few of them around -- I think there's a copy of Quag Keep in the library. It took me a long time to work out that "Andre" was a woman, which was her intention.
Born as Alice Mary Norton in 1912, Norton started writing while she was still in high school.... in 1934 she had her name legally changed to Andre Alice Norton, and adopted several male-sounding pen names so as to prevent her gender from becoming an obstacle to sales in the first market she wrote for: young boys literature.

...

In 1976, Gary Gygax even persuaded Andre Norton to try out his new Dungeons & Dragons game, and he ran her through a session in his storied world of Greyhawk. Shortly thereafter, Norton was inspired to write the very first D&D novel, Quag Keep (1979). Along with Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton was one of a handful of early authors to experience the very games that their works had inspired.
D&D with Fritz Leiber! That would have been a good time. Norton was no slouch either.

4 comments:

Texan99 said...

I don't think I ever read any Norton, but I liked Fritz Lieber.

MikeD said...

Oddly, I never read Lieber, but read Norton endlessly as a teen.

Grim said...

I didn't encounter Fritz Leiber early either. I'd heard the names "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser" before, but my actually reading the stories waited until the White Wolf edition of 1996. The books must have been in print before, but I don't remember ever encountering them before that edition, which was comprehensive of those stories across four volumes. Once I found them, though, I read them all.

Tom said...

I read at least one book by Norton as a teen, maybe more, but I can only remember one title: Star Guard. As I remember it, it was a very good military SF story.

I didn't read Leiber until much later.

Played lots of D&D as a teen, though. D&D with either or both would have been fun.