Vintage Treasures: The American Fantasy Tradition edited by Brian M. Thomsen
Brian Thomsen’s first anthology was Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows & Weefolk: A Collection of Tales of Heroes Short in Stature, a 1991 Questar paperback co-edited with Baird Searles. He followed that with more than a dozen more over the next 20 years — including The Reel Stuff (1998), Oceans of Magic (2001), and Masters of Fantasy (2004) — most co-edited with Martin H. Greenberg. He was the Senior Editor of SF and Fantasy at Warner Books and then Director of Books and Periodicals at TSR, where he wrote several Forgotten Realms novels, including Once Around the Realms (1995) and The Mage in the Iron Mask (1996).
He eventually became a Consulting Editor at Tor, where he produced in my opinion the most significant book of his career, and indeed one of the most important fantasy anthologies of the 90s: The American Fantasy Tradition, a massive 600-page hardcover surveying two centuries of American fantasy, containing stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edith Wharton, Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Charles Beaumont, Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, Shirley Jackson, Avram Davidson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Karl Edward Wagner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop, and many others.
The American Fantasy Tradition is one of the finest survey anthologies of Western fantasy ever assembled, and it would serve as a splendid textbook for any introductory course to modern fantasy. It stands with David Hartwell’s The Dark Descent, Gardner Dozois’s Modern Classics of Fantasy, and Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird as one of the essential texts of the fantasy canon.
