When was Robert E. Howard born and where did he grow up?

Robert E. Howard was born on the 22nd of January 1906 and grew up wandering through Texas cowtowns before settling in Cross Plains in 1919.

What year did Robert E. Howard start writing professionally and which magazine published him?

Robert E. Howard sold his first story in 1924 and began publishing in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Who is considered the father of the sword and sorcery genre created by Robert E. Howard?

Robert E. Howard is universally regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery genre for creating King Kull and Conan the Barbarian.

When did Robert E. Howard die and what was the cause of his death?

Robert E. Howard died on the 11th of June 1936 after shooting himself in the head following the death of his mother from tuberculosis.

What was the relationship between Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft?

Robert E. Howard maintained a lifelong correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft starting in 1930 and became a member of the Lovecraft Circle.

Robert E. Howard: the story on HearLore

Robert E. Howard was born on the 22nd of January 1906, the only son of a traveling country physician named Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and his wife Hester Jane Ervin Howard. His early years were defined by a restless existence as his family wandered through a series of Texas cowtowns and boomtowns, including Dark Valley, Seminole, Bronte, and Poteet, before settling in Cross Plains in 1919. This constant movement instilled in him a deep-seated hatred for the transient nature of oil booms, which he viewed as engines of social decay and lawlessness. While his father struggled with financial instability and get-rich-quick schemes, his mother, who had contracted tuberculosis while caring for sick relatives, became the primary architect of his intellectual life. She recited poetry daily and fiercely supported his writing ambitions, creating a bond that would later become the source of his greatest tragedy. Howard was a bookish child who found school confining and authority figures oppressive, yet he developed a fierce appreciation for physical strength and violence through watching bullies and confronting the harsh realities of the oil fields. He grew up surrounded by firsthand tales of gunfights, lynchings, and feuds, which forged a distinctly Texan, hardboiled outlook on the world that would permeate all his future fiction. Despite his intellectual pursuits, he was also a passionate fan of boxing, taking up amateur boxing and bodybuilding in his late teens to transform his skinny frame into a muscled, burly form. This duality of the scholar and the fighter would become the defining characteristic of his personality and his literary voice.

Howard's journey to becoming a professional writer was a grueling process of self-education and rejection that spanned nearly a decade. From the age of nine, he wrote stories mostly centering on historical fiction, Vikings, and bloodshed, but he did not achieve real success until he was 23. In 1924, after years of rejection slips and near misses, he finally sold a short caveman tale titled Spear and Fang for $16, introducing him to the readers of the struggling pulp magazine Weird Tales. This breakthrough did not immediately bring financial stability; Howard had to take a job writing oil news for the local newspaper Cross Plains Review at $5 per column to survive. He lost that job and spent a month working in a post office before quitting over the low wages, then worked as a stenographer for an oil company before quitting that as well due to his refusal to be subservient. He eventually found work at Robertson's Drug Store, rising to become head soda jerk on $80 per week, but the long hours made him ill. He found solace in boxing matches and drinking at the Neeb Ice House, using these physical outlets to manage his frustrations. It was not until 1929 that he became a full-time writer, making good money and earning the pride of his father. During this period, he also dabbled heavily in verse, writing hundreds of poems and getting dozens published, though he eventually judged poetry a luxury he could not afford and dedicated his time to short stories and higher-paying markets. His stories increasingly took on the aura of prose-poems filled with hypnotic, dreamy imagery, setting him apart from most other pulp efforts of the time.

In August 1926, Howard began working on the story that would become The Shadow Kingdom, one of the most important works of his career and the genesis of the sword and sorcery subgenre. This story introduced King Kull, a brooding figure ruling over the fading land of Valusia, and mixed elements of fantasy, horror, mythology, historical romance, and swordplay into a thematic vehicle never before seen. Although the term sword and sorcery was later coined by Fritz Leiber, Howard is universally regarded as the father of the genre. His first published example of sword and sorcery was actually Red Shadows, featuring the vengeful Puritan swashbuckler Solomon Kane, which appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Kane became a big hit with readers and sustained a series of seven stories from 1928 to 1932. Howard also created the character Sailor Steve Costigan, a tough-as-nails mariner who boxed his way through exotic seaports, and the character Kid Allison, a boxer created for Sport Story Magazine. His Celtic phase began in 1930, during which he became fascinated by Celtic themes and his own Irish ancestry, teaching himself a little Gaelic and creating characters like Turlogh Dubh O'Brien. He also wrote for Oriental Stories, a new pulp launched by editor Farnsworth Wright, where he crafted gloomy vignettes of war and rapine in the Middle and Far East that rivaled his best Conan stories for historical sweep. By 1931, Howard had become a regular in Weird Tales, and his success allowed him to quit all college classes and regular jobs, becoming a full-time writer from the middle of nowhere in Texas.

In August 1930, Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales praising a recent reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls, which led to a vigorous correspondence that would last for the rest of Howard's life. This connection made him a member of the Lovecraft Circle, a group of writers and friends linked via the immense correspondence of Lovecraft, who wrote over 100,000 letters in his lifetime. 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 he contributed several notable elements to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, beginning with The Black Stone. The correspondence between Howard and Lovecraft contained a lengthy discussion on the frequent element in Howard's fiction, barbarism versus civilization. Howard held that civilization was inherently corrupt and fragile, a view summed up in his famous line from 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 held the opposite viewpoint, that civilization was the peak of human achievement, but Howard gradually asserted his own views, even coming to deride Lovecraft's opinions. In 1932, Howard conceived of the character of Conan and the fantasy land of Cimmeria, a bitter hard northern region home to fearsome barbarians. He developed the Hyborian Age, an invented world populated with countries, peoples, monsters, and magic, allowing him to write fantastical historical fiction without the time-consuming research required for purely historical settings. He wrote nine Conan stories before the first saw print, and Conan first appeared to the public in Weird Tales in December 1932, becoming such a hit that Howard was eventually able to place seventeen Conan stories in the magazine between 1933 and 1936.

The onset of the Great Depression hit Howard hard, as many pulp markets reduced their schedules or went out of business entirely. Weird Tales became a bimonthly publication, and pulps such as Fight Stories, Action Stories, and Strange Tales all folded. Howard was further hit when his savings were wiped out in 1931 when the Farmer's National Bank failed, and again after transferring to another bank, when that one failed as well. In response to the collapse of markets, Howard began to write westerns, a genre he had long been fascinated with. His first commercially successful series within his own lifetime was the Breckinridge Elkins stories, humorous westerns in a similar style to his earlier Sailor Steve Costigan stories, which first appeared in the March, April 1934 issue of Action Stories. He also created characters like Pike Bearfield for Argosy and Buckner J. Grimes for Cowboy Stories. Howard's Conan stories began featuring western elements, most notably in Beyond the Black River and The Black Stranger, which used an American-frontier setting and were rare for pulp magazines to feature a pyrrhic victory. By 1934, some of the markets killed off by the Depression had come back, but Weird Tales was over $1500 behind on payments to Howard. The author therefore stopped writing weird fiction and turned his attentions to this steadily growing passion. He also wrote one of the first Weird Western stories ever created, The Horror from the Mound, published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales, which acted as a bridge between his early weird stories and his later straight western tales. Despite his success, Howard remained a man of the Depression era, earning more than anyone else in Cross Plains but still struggling with the financial instability that plagued the pulp industry.

By 1936, almost all of Howard's fiction writing was being devoted to westerns, and the novel A Gent from Bear Creek was due to be published by Herbert Jenkins in England, but life was becoming especially difficult for Howard. All of his close friends had 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 its payments. His home life was also falling apart. Having suffered from tuberculosis for decades, his mother was finally nearing death. The constant interruptions of care workers at home, combined with frequent trips to various sanatoriums for her care, made it nearly impossible for Howard to write. In hindsight, there were hints about Howard's plans. Several times in 1935, 36, whenever his mother's health had declined, he made veiled allusions to his father about planning suicide, which his father did not understand at the time. He had made references when speaking to Novalyne Price about being in his sere and yellow leaf. In the weeks before his suicide, Howard wrote to Kline giving his agent instructions of what to do in case of his death, he wrote his last will and testament, and he borrowed a .380 Colt Automatic from his friend Lindsey Tyson. On June 10, he drove to Brownwood and bought a burial plot for the whole family. On the night before his suicide, when his father confirmed that his mother was finally dying, he asked where his father would go afterwards. Isaac Howard replied that he would go wherever his son went, thinking he meant to leave Cross Plains. It is possible that Howard thought his father would join him in ending their lives together as a family. On the morning of the 11th of June 1936, Howard asked one of his mother's nurses, a Mrs. Green, if his mother would ever regain consciousness. When she told him no, he walked out to his car in the driveway, took the pistol from the glove box, and shot himself in the head.

He died eight hours later, and his mother died the following day. A double funeral service was held at Cross Plains First Baptist Church on the 14th of June 1936, and both were buried in Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood, Texas.

Robert E. Howard

The Autodidact Writer

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Common questions

The Birth Of Sword And Sorcery

The Lovecraft Circle And The Hyborian Age

The Depression And The Western Turn

The Woman Who Walked Alone

The Final Vigil And The Suicide