The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

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Andre Norton

2 universes Last reviewed 2026-08-27

Andre Norton was born Alice Mary Norton on February 17, 1912, in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a rug company owner, and began writing during high school, editing a literary page and contributing short stories to her school paper. She attended Flora Stone Mather College at Western Reserve University but left in 1932 due to the Great Depression, spending eighteen years with the Cleveland Library System and briefly serving as a special librarian at the Library of Congress from 1940 to 1941. She legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton in 1934, adopting a masculine pen name to appeal to young male readers, and published her first novel, The Prince Commands, that same year, becoming a full-time professional writer by 1958. She is best known for her expansive Witch World series, launched in 1963 and eventually spanning dozens of volumes, and for Quag Keep (1978), the first novel based on Dungeons & Dragons. Often called the "Grande Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy," Norton published more than three hundred titles across a seventy-year career, influencing authors such as C.J. Cherryh, Mercedes Lackey, and Lois McMaster Bujold. She was the first woman to win the Gandalf Grand Master Award, received the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1984, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1998; the Andre Norton Award for young-adult SF/fantasy was established in her honor in 2005. She died March 17, 2005, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at age ninety-three.

Universe(s)

The Halfblood Chronicles

  • Core Canon books: 3
  • Current rank: #438 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.98
  • Award recognitions: None recorded

Witch World

  • Core Canon books: 5
  • Current rank: #675 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.82
  • Award recognitions: 1 nomination

Books

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

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