Name: BRADLEY, Marion Eleanor (Zimmer) Aged: 69
Born: June 3, 1930 Where: Albany, New York
Died: September 25, 1999 Where: Berkeley, CA
Interred: Ashes scattered at Glastonbury Tor, Somerset, England
Married 1: Robert Alden Bradley
When: Oct 26, 1949 (div May 19, 1964)
Married 2: Walter Henry Breen
When: June 3, 1964 (div May 9, 1990)
Awarded: 2000 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Editor/founder of "Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine" and editor of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies for DAW Books. Author of The Mists of Avalon, the Ghostlight trilogy, and the world of Darkover series...among others.

Bradley received her BA from Hardin Simmons University in Austin and did graduate work at University of California, Berkeley. She began writing in her late teens and owed her longevity and success in the SF & Fantasy fields to three main things: 1) Her working relationship with editor Donald A. Wollheim of Ace and DAW; 2) Her mini-fandom of friends, family, and writers; and 3) Her continual output of readable work across four decades.

Much of this output revolved around female and feminist themes which somewhat dampened its appeal to the full spectrum of readers...even though the themes ranged from occult to SF to heroic fantasy to downright macho-feminist sword wielding heroines.

But the main chord she seemed to have struck in fandom was with the planet of Darkover. The theme was inspired by Bradley's reading of Henry Kuttner's "The Dark World" in Startling Stories, Summer 1946, which she read over and over again. Possibly more amateur writers and hopefuls turned their stories toward Darkover themes than any other inspirational source in the history of SF. Among them numbered Bradley's late brother, Paul Edwin Zimmer.

PEN NAMES: Lee Chapman, John Dexter, Miriam Gardner, Valerie Graves, and Morgan Ives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

OBITUARY: Various here.

Send relevant email to George C. Willick