Gateway Essentials: Karl Edward Wagner
Karl Edward Wagner (pronounced ‘WAG-nuh’, not ‘VARG-nuh’) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He earned a degree in history from Kenyon College in 1967 and a degree in psychiatry from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite this training, Wagner disliked the medical profession and abandoned it upon establishing himself as a writer; his disillusionment with the medical profession can be seen in the stories ‘The Fourth Seal’ and ‘Into Whose Hands’.
As well as being a multi-award winning author, Wagner was a highly successful editor and publisher of horror, science fiction and heroic fantasy, creating a definitive three-volume set of Robert E. Howard‘s Conan the Barbarian fiction, and editing the long-running and genre-defining Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy series.
Wagner is perhaps best known for his creation of the long-running series of stories featuring Kane, the Mystic Swordsman, and it is these classics of sword-and-sorcery that we have selected as Wagner’s Gateway Essentials:
You can find these and more of Karl Edward Wagner’s works via his Author page on the Gateway website, and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy.
