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Lin Carter (June 9, 1930 - February 7, 1988) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor and critic.

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After serving in Korea, he attended Columbia University. He was a copywriter for some years before writing full-time. He was married during part of his writing career, but the marriage eventually failed.

As an author, he was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Carter himself was the model for the Mario Gonzalo character.

He was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose work he anthologized in the Flashing Swords! series.

Carter is most closely associated with fellow author L. Sprague de Camp, who served as a mentor and collaborator and was a fellow member of both the Trap Door Spiders and SAGA.

A chain smoker, Carter developed cancer in the mouth in later life and had to endure disfiguring surgery to have it removed. Never really eradicated, the disease subsequently spread to his throat, leading to his death in 1988.

Carter is best known for planetary romances and heroic fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. His earliest published novel, , first of the sword and sorcery "Thongor the Barbarian" series, combines both influences. His best known series, the "Callisto" and "Zanthondon" books, are direct tributes to Burroughs' Barsoom series and Pellucidar novels, respectively. With L. Sprague de Camp, he compiled several books of Howard's Conan tales; finishing and extending many of them, and also writing pastiche novels and short stories.

Other works of Carter's pay homage to the s of contemporary pulp magazine authors or their precursors, including Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft (in various short stories), Clark Ashton Smith (in his "Green Star" novels), Leigh Brackett (in his "Mysteries of Mars" series) and Kenneth Robeson (in his "Prince Zarkon" books). Later in his career he assimulated influences from mythology and fairy tales, and even branched out briefly into pornographic fantasy.

Carter claimed to be working on an epic literary fantasy entitled . At least three excerpts were published as separate stories ("Azlon" and "The Mantichore" in 1969 and "The Sword of Power" in 1971). The complete novel never appeared, although Carter continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime.

While his fiction was often derivative, Carter was influential as a pioneering historian of fantasy, whose early studies of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft were followed up by the wide-ranging , a study tracing the emergence and development of modern fantasy from the late nineteenth century novels of William Morris through the 1970s. A tendency toward self-promotion in his non-fiction does not detract from its importance.

Carter was also a fantasy anthologist of note (the Flashing Swords series), and, as an editor for Ballantine Books, brought several obscure yet important books of fantasy back into print under the "Adult Fantasy" line, including works by Dunsany, Morris, Smith, James Branch Cabell, and Evangeline Walton, as well as helping new authors break into the field, such as Katherine Kurtz. He also edited a number of new anthologies of classic and contemporary fantasy. Later he went on to edit the first six volumes of for DAW Books.

His book reviews and surveys of the year's best fantasy fiction appeared regularly in

Wildside Press began an extensive program returning much of Carter's fiction to print in 1999.