by Rusty Burke
Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) ranks among the greatest writers of action and adventure stories. The creator of Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, ‘El Borak,’ Sailor Steve Costigan and many other memorable characters, Howard (known as REH to his millions of fans), in a career that spanned barely 12 years, wrote well over a hundred stories for the pulp magazines of his day. While he is widely regarded as the ‘father of Sword and Sorcery’ and the creator of Conan the Barbarian, this reputation has been something of a double-edged sword. It has helped keep his work in the public eye for six decades since his death, but it has also obscured the astonishing breadth of his imagination, his talent for mastering a variety of genres and his ability to weave his magic in both prose and poetry.
Robert E. Howard contributed his most celebrated work to the pre-eminent fantasy pulp magazine of the era, Weird Tales. However, his stories also appeared in such diverse publications as Action Stories, Argosy, Fight Stories, Oriental Stories, Spicy Adventure, Sport Story, Strange Detective and a number of others. That his stories were a consistent hit with readers of the time is not surprising, for he created thrilling, vividly realized adventures populated by colorful, larger-than-life characters. He was a consummate and dynamic storyteller. Even after his death publishers continued for some time to publish his stories or reprint them under other by-lines. So enduring is the appeal of his work that over a half century later he continues to gain new fans, introduced to his tales through paperbacks, comics, and movies. His work has also inspired subsequent generations of fantasy writers and a loyal following that has taken to cyberspace to spread the word.
Robert E. Howard was born on January 22 (or possibly January 24), 1906, in the “fading little ex-cowtown” of Peaster, Texas, in Parker County, just west of Fort Worth. The confusion surrounding his date of birth arises from Howard celebrating January 22 as his birthday (this was the date he submitted to Who’s Who Among North American Authors), while his record of birth in Parker County reads January 24. As his father also gave Robert’s birthday as 22 January, it is probably safe to assume that is the correct date.
What I found interesting is below.
In a letter to Lovecraft in April 1932, Howard outlined his latest creation: “I’ve been working on a new character, providing him with a new epoch - the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths. [Farnsworth] Wright rejected most of the series, but I did sell him one - ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ which deals with the adventures of King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilonia.” In a postscript to the same letter, he wrote: “Wright took another of the Conan the Cimmerian series, ‘The Tower of the Elephant,’ the setting of which is among the spider-haunted jeweled towers of Zamora the Accursed, while Conan was still a thief by profession, before he came into the kingship.”
Much later, Howard would tell a fan that “Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.” To fellow author Clark Ashton Smith he said, “While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present - or even the future - work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been unable to work up anything sell able. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen - or rather, off my typewriter - almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing.”
While it wasn’t quite as effortless as Howard makes out, there is no doubt that Conan is one of Howard’s most fully realized characters. The “little border town” where he first appeared to the author is in all likelihood Mission, Texas, where the Howards visited in early 1932. On the typescript of Howard’s poem, ‘Cimmeria,’ which he sent to Emil Petaja was the comment “Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain.” Apparently that “endless vista - hill on hill, slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers” triggered something in the subconscious of the writer. The first line of the poem is “I remember.” He explained to Smith: “Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.”
As with previous characters, however, Conan’s first adventure was not an original one. Following a tried and true pattern, Howard dusted off an unsold King Kull story, ‘By This Axe I Rule!’ and added a weird element and background about Conan. The end result was ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ (December 1932), in which the readers of Weird Tales were introduced to the Cimmerian, who would, for the next three years, rival Seabury Quinn’s occult detective Jules de Grandin as the most popular character in the magazine. The Hyborian Age, Howard’s telescoped composite of human history and cultures, allowed him free range to place his character in myriad settings, to explore human nature and history, and to try out new types of stories. In the spring of 1933, Howard took on Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent, continuing to deal directly only with Weird Tales. Under Kline’s prodding, and because his need for money was made more urgent by his mother’s worsening health and attendant medical expenses, Howard began ‘splashing the field,’ trying to write as many different types of stories for as many different magazines as he could. Conan, because he could range freely throughout the world, provided a useful vehicle for a writer trying his hand at new types of fiction. Thus we have a Conan detective story (‘The God in the Bowl’), Conan pirate stories (‘The Pool of the Black One,’ ‘The Black Stranger’), Conan frontier stories (‘Beyond the Black River’), and several Conan oriental adventures (‘A Witch Shall Be Born,’ ‘The Man-Eaters of Zamboula,’ ‘People of the Black Circle’).
And the last paragraph of the article makes a great summery.
By the time of his death, Robert E. Howard had been spinning his tales of myth and mystery for a mere dozen years, only four of which he devoted to his most famous creation, Conan. Yet today, over 60 years after his death, the adventures of the Hyborian hero and much of Howard’s other work endures. Unlike many of his contemporaries writing for the pulps, Howard’s fertile imagination and powerhouse storytelling gains him new fans in each successive generation. His work has inspired countless imitations and has been translated not only into many other languages, but into other media as well - comics, movies, television. In their wake have followed fan clubs and publications, an amateur press association founded in 1972 and still going strong, and now a growing presence on the World Wide Web. Truly, Robert E. Howard, like Conan, is one for the ages.I recommend reading the whole thing. Its a brilliant story of about one of the most creative writers on the 20th century.
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