Harold Lamb

Lamb was born September 1, 1892, in Alpine, New Jersey. His mother was Eliza Rollinson, and his father was Frederick Lamb, a mural painter who designed stained glass. His paternal grandfather was an artist who started J. & R. Lamb Studios, a company that made stained glass. He was shy with impaired hearing, sight, and speech as a child, == Career ==

Lamb built a career with his writing from an early age. He began writing for pulp magazines, writing stories about the mountains of Afghanistan and the Russian steppes. The success of Lamb's two-volume history of the Crusades led to his discovery by Cecil B. DeMille, who employed Lamb as a technical advisor on a related movie, The Crusades. He also wrote several novels which were almost like dramatized biographies; he did not invent much beyond known history. Lamb produced several fantasy novels featuring lost worlds. These included Marching Sands, about a lost city of Crusaders in the Gobi Desert. A Garden to the Eastward features a hidden tribe living in an extinct volcano in Kurdistan. == Awards ==

• In 1914, Lamb received the H.C. Bunner medal in American literature. • Lamb received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study medieval history at the Vatican Library in Rome for a year, starting on April 1, 1929. ==Reception and influence==

Robert E. Howard described Lamb as one of his "favorite writers". Cecelia Holland has described Lamb as "a master of pace [who] had a gift also for the quick glimpse of a landscape that throws everything into perspective", and has praised Lamb's plotting and action writing. Writers acknowledging the influence of Lamb's work include: Ben Bova, Thomas B. Costain, Gardner Fox, Harry Harrison, Robert E. Howard, Howard Andrew Jones, Scott Oden, Norvell Page, and Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. == Personal life ==

During World War I in May 1917, he served as a private in the Seventh New York regiment (K Company). This was the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Later, he was an informal adviser to the United States Department of State. He was also the director of the American Friends of the Middle East. He spoke French, Latin, Persian, Arabic and a smattering of Manchu-Tartar. The Persian government gave him a medal for scientific research in 1932. In 1933, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco gave him a silver medal. On April 9, 1962, Lamb died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, at the age of 69. ==Publications==

Novels • Marching Sands. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1920 • The House of the Falcon New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1921 • White Falcon. New York: McBride, 1926 • Samson and Delilah (1949). • The Golden Horde (1951)'''' • The Buccaneer (1958) ==References==