Marion Zimmer was born on a farm in Albany, New York, during the Great Depression. As a child, she enjoyed reading adventure fantasy stories. She began writing them herself in 1949 and sold her first story to Vortex in 1952. She also married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Early in her career, she used pseudonyms for stories she wrote outside the speculative fiction genre, including some gay and lesbian pulp fiction novels such as I Am a Lesbian (1962). In 1964 she divorced her first husband and married numismatist Walter H. Breen. In 1965 she received her B.A. degree from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. She then moved to Berkeley, California, to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1966, she co-founded the Society for Creative Anachronism. In 1967 she moved to Staten Island, New York. She separated from her second husband in 1979 but remained married and continued a business relationship, until 1990 when he was arrested on child molestation charges and they divorced. After suffering declining health for years, she died in Berkeley in 1999. In 2000, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement.