Despite the glacial slowness in which literature enters the public domain these days, there are now a lot of old sword & sorcery stories available online as text files or free PDFs. This includes some of the more obscure entries on the 1e DMG’s admirable Appendix N. I’ve posted a list of links below for authors with several stories available online in the public domain. (Note that there are only a few stories available for some authors; don’t expect to find any stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser behind the Leiber link, for example.)
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- James Branch Cabell
- Lord Dunsany
- Robert E. Howard
- Fritz Leiber
- H.P. Lovecraft
- A. Merritt
- Andre Norton
- Clark Ashton Smith
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Charlatan
Eric Minton
maldoor
Greengoat
David Wellington
James Nostack
tavisallison
Sweet, I’m downloading these now on my iphone!
Lord Dunsany was such an eye-opening experience when I first discovered him in college, a precursor to Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft in interesting ways. Thanks for the links!
Great find, Eric. Thanks!
Great post, great links! I don’t know how much I trust Dunsany’s claim that everything he wrote he finished in a single draft (I don’t think anyone writes fiction that way), but man is his work influential–and obviously so.
If someone reads some Dunsany and can’t see how much that one man guided literature into what we call fantasy now, they’re holding the book upside down.
PS–I just found a great copy of Howard’s Complete Conan at Barnes and Noble from some publisher I hadn’t heard of before. The art is a little screwy, but the printing is good and the book is a tome, and it was only $13. Not a bad deal!