L. Sprague de Camp, the Col. Parker of S&S?

I just read an amazing 15-part article over at rehupa.com, starting July 2008, on the influence of L. Sprague de Camp on the development of Conan in the late 1960s and later (I was referrered to it by its author Morgan Holmes.)

It is worth a look. I very well remember the 3 vols of Conan stories Karl Edward Wagner edited (remember the ones with the little pull-out posters? Amazing cover art!) And I knew since then, from reading here and there, that apparently L. Sprague de Camp, who had co-written, edited and pastiched numberous Conan works posthumous and otherwise with Lin Carter, working from fragments of Howard material and even changing Howard non-Conan stories into stories featuring the brawny Cimmerian, I had *no idea* of the extent of de Camp's influence on the Conan "cottage industry," much of it negative. Which included causing the termination of the KEW project after 3 volumes instead of six.

In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the stories of Col. Parker simultaneously promoting, vampirizing, and screwing up the career of Elvis Presley. Like Tom Parker, de Camp savagely fought to "corner the market" on the material (and as Morgan Holmes shows in explicit detail, the de Camp/Carter material was almost always quite inferior to the Howard source material), but in later years he actively worked to promote a poorer product, insisting on the "dumbing down" of the pastiche novels written by others after he and Carter finished their series of "canon" books.

I had operated for years under the assumption that if not for de Camp, Conan wouldn't have been re-discovered, and there might well not have been a sword & sorcery boom in the 1960s/1970s. Boy was I wrong. In fact, de Camp had as much as anybody to do with ending it...