Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.
She was a science
fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens, and made her first
sale as an adjunct to an amateur fiction contest in Fantastic
Amazing Stories in 1949. She had written as long as she could
remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until
1952, when she sold her first professional short story to Vortex
Science Fiction. She wrote everything from science fiction to
Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels.
In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines,
amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's
Fantasy Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also
edited an annual anthology called Sword and Sorceress for DAW
Books.
Over the years she turned more to fantasy; The House
Between the Worlds, although a selection of the
Science Fiction Book Club, was "fantasy undiluted." She
wrote a novel of the women in the Arthurian legends—Morgan Le
Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and others—entitled Mists
of Avalon, which remained four months on the NY
Times best seller list, and she also wrote The
Firebrand, a novel about the women of the Trojan
War. Her historical fantasy novel, The Forest House,
is a prequel to Mists of Avalon, and Lady
of Avalon fits between them.
She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days
after suffering a major heart attack. She was survived by her
brother, Leslie Zimmer; her sons, David Bradley and Patrick Breen;
her daughter, Moira Stern; and two grandchildren.
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