Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard died on the morning of the 11th of June 1936 at age thirty, having first asked a nurse whether his mother would ever wake from her coma. When she told him no, he walked to his car in the driveway, retrieved a .380 Colt Automatic pistol from the glove box, and shot himself in the head. His mother died the following day. A double funeral was held on the 14th of June at Cross Plains First Baptist Church. Both were buried at Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, Texas.
Howard had lived exactly the kind of compressed, furious life his stories suggested. He grew up in the oil boomtowns of Central Texas, published his first story in 1925 at age eighteen, and by twenty-three was a full-time professional writer earning more than anyone else in Cross Plains during the Great Depression. He created Conan the Barbarian, gave the world the sword and sorcery genre, and influenced writers from Michael Moorcock to Steven Erikson before dying young enough that almost none of his work had been collected into a book.
How did a doctor's son from Peaster, Texas become the father of an entire literary subgenre? What drove the strange tension in his work between brutal violence and genuine philosophical conviction? And what does his relationship with H. P. Lovecraft, Novalyne Price, and the Weird Tales circle reveal about the man behind the pulp output? Those are the questions this story will answer.
Howard was born on the 22nd of January 1906 in Peaster, Texas, the only son of Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, a traveling country physician, and his wife Hester Jane Ervin Howard. Before he turned fifteen, the family had lived in at least nine Texas towns: Dark Valley, Seminole, Bronte, Poteet, Oran, Wichita Falls, Bagwell, Cross Cut, and Burkett. His father's restlessness was compounded by money problems, some of them linked to get-rich-quick investments, and by the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage.
Hester Howard was the more formative of the two influences on her son. She had contracted tuberculosis caring for sick relatives in her youth, and she channeled her intellectual ambitions into Robert, reciting verse to him daily and backing his writing aspirations without reservation. At the same time, she worked to keep her husband at a distance from the boy, shaping the household into a close, almost excluding mother-and-son unit.
The environment outside the home was equally vivid. As the son of the local doctor, Howard witnessed what farm accidents, oil-field injuries, and an accelerating crime rate looked like on a human body. He heard firsthand accounts of gunfights, lynchings, feuds, and Indian raids from adults around him. Boxing became a serious passion early. James J. Jeffries, Jack Johnson, Bob Fitzsimmons, and later Jack Dempsey were the names he admired, and he came to see violent masculine contest as one of the few honest expressions of character.
In 1919, when Howard was thirteen, Dr. Howard moved the family permanently to Cross Plains. The following year, the Vestal Well within the town limits struck oil and Cross Plains became a boomtown almost overnight. The population jumped from 1,500 to 10,000. Roads buckled under traffic. Vice crime surged. The town also built a new school, an ice manufacturing plant, and new hotels. Howard hated the boom and the people it brought. He had spent his childhood being dragged from oilfield town to oilfield town, and watching it happen again to a place he had finally called home left a permanent mark. His view of civilization as a cycle of building, corruption, and collapse grew directly from what he saw on those unpaved Cross Plains streets.
From the age of nine Howard had wanted to write adventure fiction, and he began producing stories centered on Vikings, Arabs, battles, and historical bloodshed almost from the start. Teachers encouraged him, and he read voraciously: Jack London, especially The Star Rover from 1915; Rudyard Kipling's tales of the subcontinent; the mythological collections of Thomas Bulfinch. Friends considered him nearly eidetic. He could memorize long stretches of poetry after one or two readings.
At fifteen he sampled his first pulp magazines, particularly Adventure and its star contributors Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb. He began submitting stories to Adventure and Argosy almost immediately. Rejections accumulated. With no mentors available, Howard taught himself how publishing worked by studying the markets and tailoring his prose to each one.
In the fall of 1922, his family sent him to board in Brownwood for his senior year of high school. It was the first time he had real peers his own age who shared his literary interests. Two of them, Tevis Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson, became close friends. The three wrote amateur papers together, exchanged long letters on poetry and philosophy, and sharpened one another's ambitions. The December 1922 issue of the Brownwood High School newspaper The Tattler printed two of Howard's stories: "'Golden Hope Christmas" and "West is West", which won gold and silver prizes respectively. It was the first time his fiction appeared in print.
After graduating in May 1923, Howard returned to Cross Plains and threw himself into a self-devised exercise regimen, chopping oak trees into firewood daily and lifting weights to build out a physique he considered inadequate. In 1924, he enrolled in a stenography course at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, a practical track his father was willing to fund when a literary course was not. During Thanksgiving week of that year, after years of rejection slips, he sold a short caveman story called "Spear and Fang" to Weird Tales for sixteen dollars. He dropped out of the semester immediately and returned to Cross Plains to write.
Weird Tales paid on publication rather than on acceptance, so Howard spent the period after "Spear and Fang" writing oil news for the Cross Plains Review at five dollars per column while waiting for money to arrive. His path through the magazine's pages over the next several years was shaped by a combination of experimentation, flat rejection, and occasional breakthrough.
In August 1926, working on a story that would become "The Shadow Kingdom", Howard began experimenting with what he later called a new kind of tale: a hybrid of fantasy, horror, mythology, historical romance, and swordplay that no single category at the time adequately described. The protagonist was Kull, a barbarian who had become king of a civilized realm. Howard rewrote the story twice and submitted it to Weird Tales in September 1927. It appeared in August 1929. Editor Farnsworth Wright paid one hundred dollars for it, the most Howard had earned for a single piece at that point.
Before Kull reached readers, however, another Howard character had already defined the genre. In March 1928, Howard reworked a story Argosy had rejected and submitted "Red Shadows" to Weird Tales. Published in the August 1928 issue, it introduced Solomon Kane, a vengeful Puritan swashbuckler. Seven Kane stories ran in the magazine between 1928 and 1932. Because "Red Shadows" appeared before the first Kull story reached print, it stands as the first published example of what became sword and sorcery.
Boxing also opened a second stable market. July 1929 saw the debut of Sailor Steve Costigan in the pages of Fight Stories, a two-fisted mariner whose adventures combined tall-tale humor with slapstick. The series grew popular enough that Fight Stories' editors began running additional Costigan stories in their sister magazine Action Stories. Stories sold to Fight Stories gave Howard an income stream as reliable as Weird Tales. Street and Smith even contacted him in February 1931, asking him to move Costigan to their Sport Story Magazine. Howard refused but created a parallel series for them around a boxer called Kid Allison, writing ten stories of which Sport Story published only three.
In August 1930, Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales praising a reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" and noting some obscure Gaelic references in the text. Editor Farnsworth Wright forwarded the letter to Lovecraft, who responded warmly. A correspondence began that lasted until Howard's death.
Lovecraft wrote over 100,000 letters in his lifetime and made a practice of introducing his friends to one another. Through this network Howard became part of the Lovecraft Circle, a group that in retrospect has acquired a status compared to that of the Inklings, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Beats. Howard's Texan expansiveness earned him the nickname "Two-Gun Bob" from Lovecraft, a label that stuck. He also contributed several elements to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, beginning with "The Black Stone" and continuing through "The Cairn on the Headland", "The Children of the Night", and "The Fire of Asshurbanipal". He corresponded as well with Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, and E. Hoffmann Price.
The letters between Howard and Lovecraft circled repeatedly around a single philosophical argument. Howard held that civilization was inherently corrupt and fragile. He stated it plainly in "Beyond the Black River": "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph." Lovecraft believed the opposite. Howard initially deferred but gradually pushed back, coming eventually to dismiss Lovecraft's position outright. The tension between the two viewpoints animated a large part of Howard's fiction.
For his part, Lovecraft began incorporating Howardian action sequences into his own work, The Shadow over Innsmouth being one example. Much of 1931 saw Howard attempting to absorb Lovecraft's style before making it his own. The cross-pollination ran both ways, and the letters themselves left a documentary record that Howard scholars have worked with ever since.
Early 1932, Howard was traveling through southern Texas, eating tortillas, enchiladas, and cheap Spanish wine by his own description. Standing in Fredericksburg and looking out at sullen hills through a misty rain, he conceived of Cimmeria, a harsh northern land of fearsome barbarians. In February, while in Mission, he wrote the poem Cimmeria. A character followed.
Later, in 1935, Howard told Clark Ashton Smith in a letter 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." In practice the character took nine months to develop. Howard had already used the name for a Gaelic reaver in an unrelated story, but the Conan of the Hyborian Age was built from scratch, supported by a two-page outline that eventually grew into an 8,000-word essay called "The Hyborian Age" and two hand-sketched maps.
The first three Conan stories were completed in March 1932 and sent to Weird Tales together. "The Phoenix on the Sword" was a reworking of an unpublished Kull story called "By This Axe I Rule!", with a romantic subplot removed and a supernatural element introduced in its place. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" inverted the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne. "The God in the Bowl" moved through three drafts and functioned as a murder mystery. Farnsworth Wright rejected the first and third outright but noted that "The Phoenix on the Sword" had "points of real excellence" and suggested revisions. Howard rewrote it based on Wright's notes and it sold. Both it and "The Tower of the Elephant" were accepted without difficulty, and Howard wrote nine Conan stories before any of them appeared in print.
Conan debuted publicly in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales. Between 1933 and 1936, Howard placed seventeen Conan stories in the magazine. His only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, was probably begun on or around the 17th of March 1934 and written at approximately 5,000 words per day, seven days a week, for two months. He sent the final draft to British publisher Denis Archer on the 20th of May 1934. Archer's company went into receivership before the novel could be printed. The story was eventually serialized in Weird Tales over five months beginning with the December 1935 issue.
By late 1934, Howard's interest in Conan was drifting toward westerns. The final Conan story he completed, "Red Nails", was shaped both by his personal circumstances at the time and by an extrapolation of his civilizational philosophy. It was his last word on the character.
Howard is known to have had only one girlfriend: Novalyne Price, who had previously dated his close friend Tevis Clyde Smith. Howard first met Price in the spring of 1933 when Smith drove him to the Price farm. Price was an aspiring writer who had heard of Howard through Smith and was eager to meet him. Her diary entry after that first encounter recorded her surprise: "This man was a writer! Him? It was unbelievable. He was not dressed as I thought a writer should dress." They went for a drive and did not see each other again for over a year.
In late 1934, Price took a teaching job at Cross Plains High School through a cousin who ran the English department. When colleagues spoke disparagingly of Howard, she defended him, then phoned his house. Hester Howard blocked her calls. Price finally showed up in person. Howard and Price arranged a first date after a drive through town.
For much of the next two years they dated intermittently, spending long conversations on writing, philosophy, history, religion, and reincarnation. Both considered marriage but never at the same time. Price became ill from overwork in mid-1935. Her doctor, who was also a friend of Howard's father, advised her to end the relationship and take a job in a different state. She continued seeing Howard after her discharge, but by then he was almost entirely consumed by his mother's deteriorating health.
Howard discovered that Price had begun dating his friend Truett Vinson during a week-long trip the two men took together to New Mexico, the same journey that fed much of the imagery in "Red Nails". The friendship between Howard and Price continued until May 1936, when Price left Cross Plains to pursue a graduate degree at Louisiana State University. They never communicated again. Price had kept a detailed journal of their time together, which she later turned into the memoir One Who Walked Alone. That book became the basis for the 1996 film The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D'Onofrio as Howard and Renee Zellweger as Price.
When Howard died, Weird Tales still owed him between eight hundred and thirteen hundred dollars. His novel A Gent from Bear Creek was published in Britain one year after his death, making it his first published book. A collection of his stories, Skull-Face and Others, followed in the United States in 1946, then the novel Conan the Conqueror in 1950. That novel's success prompted a series from publisher Gnome Press, the later editor of which was L. Sprague de Camp, who eventually achieved control over the Conan brand and extended it with pastiches that, over time, crowded out the original stories.
The first major recovery effort came from Glenn Lord, who began as a fan and re-discovered many unpublished pieces that would otherwise have been lost. Lord printed them in books such as Always Comes Evening in 1957 and in his own publication The Howard Collector, which ran from 1961 to 1973. In 1966, de Camp made a deal with Lancer Books to republish the Conan series, launching the "First Howard Boom" of the 1970s. Frank Frazetta's cover artwork on most of the volumes expanded the character's reach into comic books, films, and a cultural visibility that has been compared to the icons of Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.
A second wave of interest arrived in the late 1990s and early 21st century, bringing with it restored, un-edited texts that purists had long demanded. Computer games, new films, and comic adaptations multiplied. Howard's house in Cross Plains was converted into the Robert E. Howard Museum, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2006, the Robert E. Howard Foundation was established to support further scholarship.
The critical record on Howard has never been clean. Hoffman Reynolds Hays, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Howard's work "competent pulp" driven by "the immature fantasy of a split mind." Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, described Howard's best writing as "so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks," singling out "The People of the Black Circle" specifically, while also calling much of his other work "either unremarkable or just abysmal." King separately described the horror story "Pigeons From Hell" as "one of the finest horror stories of our century." Michael Moorcock, writing in the foreword to a collection of essays on Howard, described his ability to "paint a complex scene with a few expert brushstrokes" as his greatest talent and one that could not be taught. Howard's influence on fantasy fiction is considered by scholars to be rivaled only by that of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
Who was Robert E. Howard and what did he write?
Robert E. Howard was an American pulp fiction writer born on the 22nd of January 1906 in Peaster, Texas, who died on the 11th of June 1936. He wrote across multiple genres and created characters including Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and Sailor Steve Costigan. He is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
How did Robert E. Howard create Conan the Barbarian?
Howard conceived the land of Cimmeria in early 1932 while traveling through southern Texas, and the Conan character developed over nine months. He reworked an unpublished Kull story called "By This Axe I Rule!" into the first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword", and built a full fictional world documented in an 8,000-word essay called "The Hyborian Age" supported by two hand-sketched maps. Conan first appeared publicly in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales.
Why did Robert E. Howard die by suicide?
On the morning of the 11th of June 1936, Howard was told by his mother's nurse that his mother would never regain consciousness from her coma. He walked to his car, retrieved a .380 Colt Automatic pistol, and shot himself in the head. He had made veiled references to suicidal plans to both his father and Novalyne Price during 1935 and 1936 as his mother's health declined. He died eight hours later; his mother died the following day.
What was Robert E. Howard's relationship with H. P. Lovecraft?
Howard initiated contact in August 1930 with a letter to Weird Tales praising Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls". Editor Farnsworth Wright forwarded it to Lovecraft, who responded warmly, beginning a correspondence that lasted until Howard's death. Howard contributed several stories to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and became a member of the Lovecraft Circle. The two held opposite philosophical views on barbarism versus civilization, a debate that shaped much of Howard's fiction.
Where did Robert E. Howard live and how did Texas shape his writing?
Howard spent most of his life in Cross Plains, Texas, having moved there with his family in 1919 when he was thirteen. He had previously lived in at least nine Texas towns as a child. Witnessing oil boomtowns expand and collapse, hearing firsthand accounts of gunfights and frontier violence, and observing the social disruption caused by the Cross Plains oil boom of 1920 shaped his recurring literary theme: civilizations rising, becoming corrupt, and falling to barbarian forces.
What is the sword and sorcery genre and did Robert E. Howard invent it?
Sword and sorcery is a fantasy subgenre combining action, swordplay, horror, mythology, and historical romance in exotic settings. Howard is regarded as its father. The first published example of the genre is considered to be "Red Shadows", a Solomon Kane story that appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales, predating the first Kull story in print. The genre grew from Howard's work and produced many imitators, including later writers such as Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, and Steven Erikson.
All sources
1 references cited across the entry
- 1BookJournal of Education Culture and Society 2013_2Aleksander Kobylarek — September 2, 2013