R. A. Salvatore

Salvatore's career was built by a character he invented as an afterthought. The Crystal Shard, published in 1988, was a Forgotten Realms novel with a barbarian hero and a dark elf in support. The dark elf, Drizzt Do'Urden, took the series over, and Salvatore has been writing him for more than thirty years since. The prequel trilogy that opens with Homeland, the one telling Drizzt's origin, arrived two years after the book that introduced him, which is the usual order of events when a side character gets away from an author.

He writes fight scenes better than anyone else in commercial fantasy, and that is a narrower skill than it sounds. A Salvatore duel has geometry: footing, angles, reach, one blade doing something the other cannot answer, with the outcome following from the mechanics rather than from whoever the plot needs standing at the end. The rest of the prose is serviceable and the moral universe is uncomplicated, which is part of the appeal for readers who arrived at fourteen and stayed.

Away from the Realms he built his own high fantasy world in the DemonWars Saga, and took two of the largest work-for-hire jobs in the business: Vector Prime, which opened the Star Wars New Jedi Order series, and the novelisation of Attack of the Clones. He has sold more than fifteen million copies in the United States alone and put twenty-two titles on the New York Times list.