<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A(braham) Merritt (January 20,1884 – August 21, 1943). Merritt was the first American writer of what we would call today heroic fantasy. Like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Merritt first sold to the All-Story magazine. His work often dealt with remnants of ancient civilizations whose technologies resembled magic, as in his first novel, The Moon Pool (serialized in 1919) concerning the discovery of a lost world beneath the Pacific Ocean.

Merritt's favorite of his novels was The Ship of Ishtar (1924), a fantasy that shifts between the supernatural occurrences on an ancient ship and events in the modern world. Perhaps his most popular novel is Dwellers in the Mirage (1932), in which a foot-loose Irish-American finds the remnants of a lost civilization -- and a terrifying religion -- among the Turkic peoples of the Gobi Desert. Writers such as Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, clearly drew as much on Merritt as on Burroughs for inspiration.

Merritt came to prominence as a writer of short-stories, and the collection of his short works, The Fox Woman (published 1949) is notable for "The People of the Pit" (1918), a submarine story that had a remarkable effect on the young H. P Lovecraft, and the Chinese fantasy with which Merritt began his career, "The Dragon Glass" (1917).