Robert E Howard

Robert E Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was a classic American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion” and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of “a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror.”

He is most famous for having created — in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales — the character Conan the Cimmerian AKA Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose instantly recognizable pop-culture imprint is rivaled by only a handful of other literary characters, such as Tarzan of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

Between Conan and his other heroes Robert E Howard single-handedly created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a wide swath of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy.

A full century after his birth, Robert E Howard remains a seminal figure, with his best work endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to other American masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.

Robert E Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, the only son of a wandering country physician, Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, and his tubercular wife, Hester Jane Ervin Howard. Both sides of the family had longstanding roots throughout the American South, with various ancestors owning plantations and fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Thus a postbellum mindset of loss, anger, and pride would dominate Howard’s later fictional works.

The author’s early life was spent wandering through a variety of dusty Texas cow towns and boomtowns: Dark Valley (1906), Seminole (1908), Bronte (1909), Poteet (1910), Oran (1912), Wichita Falls (1913), Bagwell (1913), Cross Cut (1915), and Burkett (1918). Talking to aging Civil War veterans and Texas Rangers, listening to grisly ghost stories told by his grandmother and various ex-slaves, and visiting old forts and historical sites all had a strong influence on his personality. By the time he reached his teens, Howard had soaked in the dying of the Frontier, the bloody history and legendry of the American Southwest, and the art of the tall tale.

During Robert E Howard’s youth his mother Hester had a particularly strong influence on his intellectual growth. Known throughout her family as a kind and giving woman — she had selflessly spent her early years helping a variety of sick relatives, contracting tuberculosis in the process — it was she who instilled in her son a deep love of poetry and literature, filling his ears daily with recited verse, and who supported him unceasingly in his efforts to write. Howard never forgot her many kindnesses both to himself and his extended family, and her growing sickness and invalidity did much to cement his view of existence as heartless, unfair, and ultimately futile.

Other themes began to appear at this time which would later seep into his prose. Robert E Howard loved reading and learning, but found that school, jobs, and most bastions of authority were to him hated prisons filled with stultifying rules and endless boredom. Experiences watching and confronting bullies revealed the omnipresence of evil and enemies in the world, and taught him the value of brute physical strength and violence. Firsthand tales of gunfights, lynchings, feuds, and Indian raids developed his distinctly Texan, hardboiled outlook on the world.

Sports, especially boxing, became a passionate preoccupation. At the time, boxing was the most popular sport in the country, with a cultural influence far in excess of what it is today. Jim Jeffries, Jack Johnson, Bob Fitzsimmons, and later Jack Dempsey were the names that dominated Robert E Howard’s dreams during those years, and he grew up a lover of all contests of violent, masculine struggle.

Specifically, he focused in on a type of boxer he called Iron Men, tough battlers who had little skill but made up for it in the sheer ability to take punishment that would kill a lesser man. Inspired by these heroes, Howard lifted weights, practiced boxing and wrestling with friends, and read everything he could find on the subject — most notably in exciting, somewhat lurid magazines such as The Ring and The Police Gazette.

In 1919, when Robert E Howard was thirteen, Dr. Howard moved his family to the Central Texas hamlet of Cross Plains, and there the family would stay for the rest of Howard’s life. That same year, sitting in a library in New Orleans while his father took medical courses at a nearby college, Howard discovered a book concerned with the scant fact and abundant legendry surrounding an ancient group of barbaric tribesmen in ancient Scotland called the Picts.

Named for the tattoos they decorated themselves with and bitter enemies of encroaching Roman legions, the Picts fired Howard’s imagination and crystallized in him a love for barbarians and outsiders from civilization who lived lives of great hardship and struggle but also great freedom and verve. From then on, the Picts became a muse of sorts, appearing in various guises throughout all the many genres Howard wrote in, and helping to thematically tie his work together.

Voracious reading, along with a natural talent for prose writing and the encouragement of teachers, conspired to create in Robert E Howard an interest in becoming a professional writer. From the age of nine he began writing stories, mostly tales of historical fiction centering on Vikings, Arabs, battles, and bloodshed. One by one he discovered the authors that would influence his later work: Jack London and his stories of reincarnation and past lives, most notably The Star Rover (1915); Rudyard Kipling’s tales of subcontinent adventure and his chanting, shamanic verse; the classic mythological tales collected by Thomas Bulfinch.

Robert E Howard was considered by friends to be eidetic (i.e. had a photographic memory), and astounded them with his ability to memorize lengthy reams of poetry with ease after one or two readings.

At fifteen Robert E Howard first sampled the popular world of pulp magazines, especially Adventure and its star authors Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb. Like a lightning bolt striking, his fate was sealed — come hell or high water, he was going to be an adventure writer. The next few years saw him creating a variety of series characters: El Borak (a Texan cross between John Rambo and T. E. Lawrence), a cowboy hero named The Sonora Kid, the puritan avenger Solomon Kane, and the last king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn.

Soon the fifteen-year-old was submitting stories to pulps such as Adventure and Argosy. Rejections piled up, and with no mentors or instructions of any kind to aid him, Howard became a writing autodidact, methodically studying the markets and tailoring his stories and style to each.

In the fall of 1922, when Robert E Howard was sixteen, he temporarily moved to a boarding house in the nearby city of Brownwood to complete his senior year of high school, and it was in Brownwood that he first met friends his own age who shared his interest not only for sports and history but also writing and poetry. The two most important of these, Tevis Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson, shared his Bohemian and literary outlook on life, and together they wrote amateur papers and magazines, exchanged long letters filled with poetry and existential thoughts on Life and Philosophy, and encouraged each other’s writing endeavors.

Robert E Howard also spent his late school years engaging in a self-created regimen of exercise and sparring, eventually building himself into a muscled, burly specimen. He began boxing locally in seedy drinking and gambling venues such as the local Cross Plains icehouse, gaining a reputation for toughness and seldom if ever losing a fight. All of this real-life experience with physical struggle began factoring heavily in his stories, giving them a frighteningly realistic aura and power seldom seen in literature.

As Kane and Costigan stories were rattling off his typewriter, Robert E Howard began audacious experiments with the entire concept of the weird tale as defined by practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft, mixing elements of fantasy, horror, mythology, and swordplay into thematic vehicles never before seen.

After two years of successive drafts, rewrites, and world creation, he finished “The Shadow Kingdom,” which for the first time richly blended elements of horror, history, barbaric adventure, high fantasy, and philosophy into a new style of tale which ultimately became known as Sword and Sorcery. Featuring King Kull, a barbarian precursor to later heroes such as Conan, the tale hit Weird Tales in August 1929 and received much fanfare from readers. Several more Kull stories followed, but enough of them were rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright to convince Howard not to continue the series.

With his own interest in Solomon Kane dwindling and his Kull stories not catching on, Howard applied his new Sword-and-Sorcery template to one of his first loves: the Picts. His story “Kings of the Night” depicted King Kull conjured into pre-Christian Britain to aid the Picts in their struggle against the invading Romans, and introduced readers to Howard’s king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. Howard followed up this tale with the now-classic revenge nightmare “Worms of the Earth” and several other tales, creating horrific adventures tinged with a Cthulhu-esque gloss and notable for their memorable use of metaphor and symbolism.

In August 1930 Robert E Howard wrote a letter into Weird Tales praising a recent reprint of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” and discussing some of the obscure Gaelic references used within. Wright forwarded the letter to Lovecraft, who responded warmly to Howard, and soon the two Weird Tales veterans were engaged in a vigorous correspondence that would last for the rest of Howard’s life.

By virtue of this, Howard quickly became a member of “The Lovecraft Circle,” a group of writers and friends all linked via the immense correspondence of HPL, who made it a point to introduce his many like-minded friends to each other and encourage them to share stories, utilize each other’s invented fictional trappings, and help each other succeed in the pulp field. In time this circle of correspondents has developed a legendary patina about it rivaling similar literary conclaves such as The Inklings, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Beats.

Robert E Howard was given the affectionate nickname “Two-Gun Bob” by virtue of his long explications to Lovecraft about the history of his beloved Southwest, and during the ensuing years he contributed several notable elements to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos of horror stories. He also corresponded with other weird tale writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and E. Hoffmann Price.

With the onset of the Great Depression, many pulp markets reduced their schedules or went out of business entirely. Howard saw market after market falter and vanish — Fight Stories, Action Stories — and his savings was wiped out when the local Cross Plains banks failed. Yet even during the worst of these times, he kept plugging away at the writing game and breaking new markets.

When Farnsworth Wright started a new pulp called Oriental Stories, Robert E Howard was overjoyed — here was a venue where he could run riot through favorite themes of history and battle and exotic mysticism. During the four years of the magazine’s existence, he crafted some of his very best tales, gloomy vignettes of war and rapine in the Middle and Far East during the Middle Ages, tales that rival even his best Conan stories for their historical sweep and jewelled splendor. In addition to series characters such as Turlogh dubh O’Brien and Cormac FitzGeoffrey, Howard sold a variety of tales depicting various times and periods through the Middle Ages.

Early 1932 saw Robert E Howard taking one of his frequent trips around Texas. In Fredericksburg, while overlooking sullen hills through a misty rain, he conceived of the fantasy land of Cimmeria, a bitter hard northern region home to fearsome barbarians. Going back home he developed the idea, fleshing out a new invented world — his Hyborian Age — and populating it with all manner of countries, peoples, monsters, and magic. His Cimmerian hero, Conan, derived from a host of influences, including the previous Kull and a character also named Conan from a reincarnation story he wrote earlier called “People of the Dark”.

Conan first appeared in Weird Tales in December 1932's "The Phoenix on the Sword", and was such a hit that Robert E Howard was able to place seventeen more Conan stories in the magazine between 1933 – 36. The character had a wide and enduring influence among other WT writers, including C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber, and over the ensuing decades the genre of Sword and Sorcery grew up around Howard’s masterwork, with dozens of practitioners evoking Howard’s creation to one degree or another.

But throughout all of this time, Robert E Howard continued to be dogged by fits of increasingly unbearable melancholy and depression, and he maintained his belief in the validity of suicide as an escape from the nightmarish pain. All of his close friends had become married and were immersed in their careers, Novalyne Price had left Cross Plains for graduate school, and his most reliable market, Weird Tales, had grown far behind on payments.

Most importantly, his home life was falling apart — after decades of struggle, his mother was finally nearing death, and the constant interruptions of care workers at home combined with frequent trips to various sanatoriums for her care made it nearly impossible to write. Several times in 1935 – 36, whenever his mother’ health precipitously threatened to give out, he made veiled allusions to his father about planning suicide, something both parents made efforts to talk him out of. In June 1936, as Hester Howard slipped into her final coma, her son maintained a death vigil with his father and friends of the family, getting little sleep, drinking huge amounts of coffee, and growing more despondent — perhaps, given his exhaustion, deliriously so.

On the morning of June 11, 1936, told by a nurse that his mother would never again regain consciousness, Robert E Howard walked out to his car in the driveway, took a borrowed .38 automatic from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. His father and another doctor rushed out, but the wound was too grievous for anything to be done. Howard lived for another eight hours, dying at 4 p.m.; his mother died the following day. They were both buried on June 14, 1936 in a double funeral in Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, Texas.

Robert E Howard’s death sent shockwaves of grief through the weird fiction community, vividly documented in the pulps and fanzines of the era, and marked the beginning of the end of the magazine’s Golden Age. H. P. Lovecraft was severely affected by the death of his friend, and within a year would die himself of intestinal cancer. Clark Ashton Smith (the third member of the great triumvirate of Weird Tales ), was stricken by the deaths of Howard and Lovecraft as well as those of his own parents, and soon stopped writing fiction himself, fading from the scene.

• Conan
  • The Sword of Conan (1952)
  • The Coming of Conan (1953)
  • King Conan (1953)
  • Conan the Barbarian (1955)
  • Tales of Conan (1955) with L. Sprague de Camp
  • Wolfshead (1968)
  • Conan the Avenger (1968) with L. Sprague de Camp and Bjorn Nyberg
  • Swords of Shahrazar (1976)
  • Conan the Avenger (1984) with L. Sprague de Camp and Bjorn Nyberg
  • 1 Conan (1967) with L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
  • 2 Conan of Cimmeria (1969) with L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
  • 3 Conan the Freebooter (1968) with L. Sprague de Camp
  • 4 Conan the Wanderer (1968) with L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter
  • 5 Conan the Adventurer (1966) with L. Sprague de Camp
  • 7 Conan the Warrior (1966) with L. Sprague de Camp
  • 8 Conan the Usurper (1967) with L. Sprague de Camp
  • 9 Conan the Conqueror (1950)
  • 10 The Return of Conan (1957) with L. Sprague de Camp and Bjorn Nyberg
    • Variant Title: Conan the Avenger (1968) (1957) [as by Bjorn Nyberg and Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp ]

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Image #1 from fantasticfiction.co.uk #2 from rehupa.com #3 from metroactive.com (Image is of Vincent D'onofrio in The Whole Wide World)