Introductions - “The Best of Robert E. Howard”

As the stories in this book will prove, Robert E. Howard was a writer who could make any genre his own, and even create a new genre when circumstance called for it. In these pages, you’ll encounter stories of fantasy, horror, adventure, and humor. Taken individually, they are a real treat to illustrate. Taken as a collection, however, they present a unique challenge.

Our art director, Marcelo Anciano, made it clear that our job was to find a way to unify these stories, rather than schizophrenically shift art styles to suit the mood or character of specific tales. We had to find a common visual cue that could carry us from the ancient Hyborian kingdoms of Conan, through the Elizabethan world of Solomon Kane, to the battlefields of the American Civil War and the hills of 1930s Afghanistan. Robert E. Howard’s deeply held philosophy of absolute, rugged individualism was the obvious common thread. No matter the genre, Howard wrote of individuals standing tall against the forces that would oppose them—seen and unseen, natural or otherwise—preferring to be crushed into the ground and flattened rather than to give so much as an inch.

Last year, on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we saw a small painting by Thomas Eakins. It was a study of a bearded man set against a neutral background, his face and torso falling away into darkness. Despite the simplicity of presentation, the figure had a look of majesty that was nothing short of biblical. Eakins had carved out his subject in harsh light and deep shadow—a yin and yang of values combined to create elegant graphic shapes that told a complex story in one striking design.

It was this simple image that gave us our direction for the illustrations and fed nicely into our existing fascination with the streamlined poster style of the 1920s and ’30s (Howard’s own era). This approach was pioneered and best exemplified by the German master Ludwig Hohlwein (a devotee of the “Beggarstaffs”), whose graphic simplicity could make even an illustration for a lady’s hat monumental. We tried to stay true to this artistic legacy of form and design: concise and bold with a minimum of strokes, the physical power of the individual immediately recognizable at a glance.

Of course, our efforts are not the point. We’re all here for the words of Robert E. Howard. So, it’s time to sit back, and prepare for REH to put steel in your arms and fire in your eyes.

Introduction

So says Robert E. Howard to Novalyne Price as they drive along beneath the Texas moon in the movie The Whole Wide World, and while the quotation is not attested in any written source (including Price’s memoir upon which the film is based), it’s hard to beat as a concise statement of what the reader will find upon first encountering the fiction of REH, as he’s known to his legions of fans. As with any great writer, there is more to it than that—people don’t keep reading an author’s work seventy years after his death if all it offers is excitement and adventure—but Howard always lived up to the first obligation of the storyteller, which is to tell a ripping good yarn. In this volume and its forthcoming companion, you will find excitement and adventure aplenty.

Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) lived his entire life in small Texas towns, chiefly Cross Plains, far from the literary world. Yet by the time he was a teenager he had apparently decided upon a career as a writer. “It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments,” he wrote to his fellow weird fictionist H. P. Lovecraft. “I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand, I am not criticizing those environments. They were good, solid and worthy. The fact that they were not inducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe. The people among which I lived—and yet live, mainly—made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. That is most certainly not in their disfavor. But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.”

After three years of unsuccessfully sending stories to magazines, at the age of eighteen Howard sold his first professional story to a new magazine of “the bizarre and unusual,” the now legendary Weird Tales (which introduced the world not only to Howard, but to H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury, among many others). In a brief, twelve-year career, Howard wrote some 300 stories and more than 800 poems. His work covered a variety of genres—fantasy, boxing, westerns, horror, adventure, historical, detective, spicy, even confessions—and graced the pages of such pulp magazines as Action Stories, Argosy, Fight Stories, Oriental Stories, Spicy Adventure, Sport Story, Strange Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Top Notch, and a number of others. Pulp writers often found that a character who was popular with readers could be a significant meal ticket, but Howard had difficulty keeping a series going indefinitely. Once he found himself “out of contact with the conception,” he was “unable to write convincingly” of that character. If he was to convince the reader, he had to be convinced himself. As Lovecraft famously noted, the thing that makes a Howard story stand out is that “he himself is in every one of them.” Fortunately, characters seem to have come easily to him. He is most famous, of course, for Conan of Cimmeria, who has taken on a life of his own as “Conan the Barbarian,” far removed from Howard’s brilliantly original conception; herein you will find other great characters, like Kull of Atlantis, king of fabled Valusia; Solomon Kane, the swashbuckling Puritan adventurer; Bran Mak Morn, last king of an ancient race; Sailor Steve Costigan, the champion of the forecastle; Breckinridge Elkins, the man-mountain who can’t seem to avoid walking into trouble; Steve Harrison, the detective who’s as likely to solve the mystery with his fists as with his wits; and many others. They run the gamut from dark fantasy to broad humor, from brooding horror to gentle love story.

Given such a wealth of riches to choose from, one who has the audacity to select the “best” of a writer’s work should provide some explanation as to how the stories were chosen. It must be admitted that this is, fundamentally, my personal selection of the stories and poems I think Howard’s best, but with a caveat: we wanted a representative sampling of his best work, and so necessarily had to limit the number of selections for any single character. I have long wished there were a volume of Howard stories that I could hand to a friend who expressed interest in his work, a book full of great stories that illustrated the full range of his repertoire. We’ve ended up with a two-volume collection, rather than one, because, frankly, it was just too hard to whittle it down any further. As it is, some of my favorite stories and poems are not included, and I’m sure that there will not be many Howard fans who don’t find some of their own favorites missing.

While I made the selections, I did have some assistance from a poll I conducted among long-time Howard fans, asking for their favorite stories or those they found most memorable. Of the top twenty-five stories in that poll, nineteen are included in these volumes, and five of those left out are Conan tales: to make room for other characters and stories, I made the arbitrary decision to include only two Conan stories in each volume, and the ones chosen ended up being the top four vote-getters in the poll. In most other cases, the story selected for these volumes was the highest ranking tale of its type in the poll. The top vote-getter overall was Worms of the Earth, followed by the Conan stories Red Nails (which will appear in the second volume) and Beyond the Black River.

The Shadow Kingdom is often cited as the first story of what has come to be known as “sword and sorcery,” a genre Howard is credited with having invented, and thus is important as a milestone in the history of fantasy literature, but it is also a terrific story, one Steven Trout has called “a memorable piece of purest paranoia.” Lovecraft believed that the Kull stories were the best of Howard’s heroic tales, and many have agreed with his assessment, though Howard was able to sell only two stories of the series during his lifetime. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright asked readers to name their favorite stories in each issue, and tallied the results. The Shadow Kingdom was the favorite of readers in the August 1929 issue, and ranked second overall that year, behind only Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror.

The Curse of the Golden Skull has only the barest mention of Kull, but is included here as a fine example of Howard’s prose poetry. Howard was a natural poet, often filling his letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith with page after page of apparently spontaneous poetry, and his friends recalled him being able to memorize long passages with only a reading or two. (He is alleged to have memorized The Rime of the Ancient Mariner after only two readings!) His father later recalled that Robert’s mother “loved poetry. Written poetry by sheets and reams, almost books of it, were stored in her memory so that from Robert’s babyhood he had heard its recital day by day.” His love of poetry infuses most of his best fiction, and in prose poems like The Curse of the Golden Skull we find it in concentrated form.

Red Shadows, the first published story of Solomon Kane, has its supporters for the title of first sword and sorcery tale, having been published a year before The Shadow Kingdom. Kane is one of Howard’s most fascinating, complex characters, a man who believes himself to be doing the will of God, while consorting with a witch-doctor and, in occasional moments of self-awareness, realizing that he is driven by lust for adventure. The story is an early one, written when Howard was only twenty-one, so it has a few rough patches, but it is a favorite of most REH fans and includes many memorable moments, not least Kane’s vow of vengeance that sets him on the trail of Le Loup.

Lovecraft told E. Hoffmann Price, after Howard’s death, “I always gasped at his profound knowledge of history . . . and admired still more his really astonishing assimilation and visualisation of it. He was almost unique in his ability to understand and mentally inhabit past ages. . . .” The Solomon Kane poem The One Black Stain provides an outstanding example, as Howard places himself (through his Puritan adventurer) at the scene of an incident during Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. Another fine example herein is the poem An Echo from the Iron Harp, narrated by a warrior of the Cimbri who defeated Roman legions in several battles before being defeated themselves at Vercellae.

The Dark Man is one of three tales in this volume that feature Bran Mak Morn, though in this one he is a distant historical memory, living on only as a lifeless statue—or is it lifeless? The real protagonist of the story is the Irish outlaw Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, “Black Turlogh,” whose pronouncement at the end of this savage tale seems to be all too true. So intense was Howard’s interest in and admiration for the Irish that he created for himself an Irish and Celtic ancestry. Characters such as Turlogh O’Brien and Cormac Mac Art, and martial poetry like The Marching Song of Connacht and The Song of the Last Briton reflect this interest. At the time Howard was writing, the Irish war for independence from Britain and the creation of the Irish Free State were recent memories, and resentments were still raw.

Kings of the Night is quite an unusual story for Howard, in that it unites two of his characters from disparate eras, Kull of antediluvian Atlantis and Bran Mak Morn of Roman-era Britain, in a pitched battle against a Roman legion. Weird Tales readers voted it the best story of the November 1930 issue, and it got more votes than any other story that year.

In 1930 also Howard began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft, and the initial exchanges apparently inspired him to try his hand at Lovecraft’s style of fiction. HPL (also known to his fans by his initials) had created an artificial mythos (now widely known as the “Cthulhu mythos,” after his story The Call of Cthulhu) which he sprinkled through his stories and those of writers whose work he was revising for publication, in order to give an impression of verisimilitude, and which he encouraged other writers to borrow from and add to. The Black Stone is Howard’s best story of this type, featuring such contributions to the shared mythos as the German occultist Von Junzt and his hellish “Black Book,” Nameless Cults (later dubbed, after much correspondence among the Weird Tales writers, Unaussprechlichen Kulten) and the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey (who could well have been the composer of The Song of a Mad Minstrel).

One of Howard’s most successful series was about as far from the field of fantasy and horror fiction as one can go. An avid boxing enthusiast, Howard also had an antic sense of humor, and both of these went into the rollicking misadventures of Sailor Steve Costigan, who has a heart of gold, a head of wood, and fists of iron. An able-bodied seaman on a tramp steamer, he gets matched against the champs of other ships in exotic ports around the world, and manages to get hoodwinked by dames, cheated by shifty promoters, and victimized by misunderstandings, yet emerges (somewhat) victorious—at least in the ring. Twenty-one of the Costigan stories were published during Howard’s lifetime (twenty-two if we count a story in which his name was changed to “Dennis Dorgan”), compared to seventeen Conan tales, yet Howard’s boxing yarns had, until recently, gotten short shrift from fans and scholars, possibly due to the decline in popularity of the sport itself. Thanks to the work of Mark Finn and Chris Gruber, among others, these stories are again taking their rightful place in Howard’s body of work, and fans are getting a chance to see the more exuberant side of REH.

In 1931, hoping to break into a magazine featuring historical fiction, Howard wrote a story called Spears of Clontarf, a fictionalized account of the battle in 1014 in which the Irish under Brian Boru routed the Vikings who had established themselves in Dublin. When the story was rejected, he revised it, adding a weird element in hopes of selling it to either the new magazine Strange Tales or his old standby Weird Tales. In this, too, he was unsuccessful, but not because it wasn’t a fine story—it is. Farnsworth Wright, the Weird Tales editor, returned it with the comment that “the weird element is not as strong as I would like it to be.” Possibly he had just received a letter, later published in the magazine, complaining that the story The Dark Man was not really weird. Fortunately, we are not required to worry about whether the story is “weird enough,” and can include this fine tale of the twilight of an age.

As previously mentioned, the story most often named by Howard fans as their favorite or most memorable is the best of the Bran Mak Morn tales, Worms of the Earth. Here Bran swears an awful vengeance against Rome, but he pays a terrible price. No other of his fictional creations had the enduring appeal to Howard of his Picts, who appear in his fiction from 1923 to 1935, and in not only the Bran Mak Morn series, but also the Kull and Conan series, and a number of stand-alone stories. Worms of the Earth, though, stands out from the rest of the Pictish stories, and Howard himself explained the reason: “My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy—that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes—thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story [Men of the Shadows]—which was rightfully rejected—I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in The Lost Race the central figure was a Briton; and in Kings of the Night it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, The Worms of the Earth which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”

One genre in which Howard was not entirely comfortable, and therefore not especially successful, was the detective story. Abandoning the field after about three years of trying to write them, he said, “I can’t seem to get the hang of the art. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to write them. I’d rather write adventure stuff.” There is little of “mystery” to his detective tales, but a lot of adventure, and Steve Harrison and his brethren are more likely to solve the crime with brawn than with brains. These stories have more in common with Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu tales than with Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Yet, as Fred Blosser never tires of reminding me, they are action-packed stories, and the best of them, like the novel Skull-Face and the story included here, Lord of the Dead, can stand proudly alongside Howard’s other work. I do love the over-the-top climax to this tale.

Robert E. Howard loved folk songs, and sprinkled them liberally through his fiction. At one point in the mid-1920s he corresponded with the noted folklorist Robert W. Gordon, at the time compiler of the Adventure magazine department “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” later the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (where the letters he received from Howard are held). Here we have a story built around a folk song, “For the Love of Barbara Allen.” It shows a gentler side of Howard, not often revealed. We see it, too, in the poem The Tide. Fans of the movie The Whole Wide World may recognize two stanzas which Robert Howard, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, reads to his mother in the film. It certainly resonates with the title of Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir on which the movie was based: One Who Walked Alone.

Scholars are divided over whether or not REH actually believed in reincarnation, but there’s no question that he used it a lot as a plot device. His James Allison stories, of which most fans consider The Valley of the Worm the best, probably owe something to Jack London’s novel The Star Rover, a book which, Howard said, “I’ve read and reread for years, and that generally goes to my head like wine.” In that book, London’s protagonist, Darrell Standing, imprisoned for murder and placed in solitary confinement, escapes from the brutal reality of the present by mentally revisiting past lives. Howard apparently liked the plot device, but he made his character an invalid rather than a convict, which provides a strong contrast with the virile heroes Allison had been in his past lives. The ethnology is certainly outdated, but the story itself is timeless.

The People of the Black Circle is one of the stories people first think of when they think of Conan. It has it all, the exotic locale, the beautiful (and feisty) woman, the crafty and powerful wizards, the headlong narrative pace. It is sword and sorcery at its best. The other Conan tale here, Beyond the Black River, is, as previously noted, one of only three stories named on more than half the ballots in my poll of Howard fans. It has aroused occasional controversy: some critics have claimed that, because it uses some names from Robert W. Chambers’ Revolutionary War novels, the setting is probably derived from upstate New York, while others (of whom I am one) claim that it is a story of the Texas frontier, played out on Conan’s Hyborian Age stage. Novalyne Price Ellis, with whom Howard discussed the story, said it was a Texas story. And we have this passage from a letter to Lovecraft: “A student of early Texas history is struck by the fact that some of the most savage battles with the Indians were fought in the territory between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. . . . In the old times the red-skins held the banks of the Brazos. Sometimes they drove the ever-encroaching settlers back—sometimes the white men crossed the Brazos, only to be hurled back again, sometimes clear back beyond the Trinity. But they came on again—in spite of flood, drouth, starvation and Indian massacre.” Yet whatever may be its setting, this tale of conflict on the frontier is one of Howard’s finest stories, and it concludes with one of his most memorable, and most often quoted, lines.

One of the earliest characters created by Robert E. Howard was Francis X. Gordon, called in the Orient “El Borak,” the Swift. The author claimed to have created the character when he was only ten years old. In the surviving early El Borak stories, written when Howard was about sixteen, Gordon seems to be a relatively urbane man of the world. None of those early tales is complete, and the character apparently faded from Howard’s consciousness for several years. When he started “splashing the field,” though, in response to the failures of some of his markets during the Depression, he revived Gordon, but the veneer of urbanity was now gone entirely, and the former gunslinger of the Texas border had gone native in the Middle East. Hawk of the Hills, in addition to being a terrific story, is an interesting twist on one of the major inspirations for the El Borak series, Talbot Mundy, as Howard’s character must save the hide of another who appears to be based on Mundy’s Athelstan King (of King of the Khyber Rifles, and other stories).

By 1933, Howard’s attentions were turning toward writing westerns, and when an old stand-by, Action Stories, returned from a year-long hiatus, he submitted a story modeled on the Steve Costigan series that had been successful in the magazine (and its sibling publication, Fight Stories) before it suspended publication. This time, however, his protagonist was not a battling sailor, but an enormous mountain man by the name of Breckinridge Elkins, of Bear Creek, Nevada. Breck’s simple, trusting nature frequently gets him into trouble, as does his tendency to fall in love with any pretty girl he sees, but his size and indestructibility generally see him through. These are unabashed tall tales in the Texan tradition, and show off Howard’s madcap humor to hilarious effect. They were so popular in Action Stories, appearing in every issue of that magazine between March 1934 and October 1936, that when the editor moved over to Argosy early in 1936, he asked Howard to supply him with stories of the same type, thus providing an opening to one of the better pulps, a market the young author had for some time been hoping to crack. Unfortunately, while Howard could have some fun with the self-destructive intent of Jack Sprague in Sharp’s Gun Serenade, his own story did not have such a happy ending.

Here in this first of two volumes collecting the best stories from Robert E. Howard’s varied repertoire, you will find plenty of thrilling action, and if you read the stories a second time, or a third, you will also find that he is, as one fan magazine put it, deeper than you think. I’ll leave it to Charles Hoffman’s essay to illuminate some of the great themes in these stories. For my part, I simply hope that you will find them as enthralling as I do, and will enjoy them enough to seek out other collections of his work. Turn the page, and let Robert E. Howard sweep you into his world of excitement and adventure.

Robert E. Howard:

Twentieth-Century Mythmaker

by Charles Hoffman

Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation, the indomitable barbarian warrior Conan, was introduced in the December 1932 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. For the first story in the series, Howard provided a brief preface that served to set the stage for Conan’s debut:

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

Earlier, the editor of Weird Tales had requested some biographical information about the young author himself. Howard’s response painted a very different picture:

Like the average man, the tale of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and toil, a grinding struggle against poverty. I have spent most of my life in the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas, and since infancy my memory holds a continuous grinding round of crop failures—sandstorms—drouths—floods—hot winds that withered the corn—hailstorms that ripped the grain to pieces—late blizzards that froze the fruit in the bud—plagues of grasshoppers and boll weevils. . . .

I’ve picked cotton, helped brand a few yearlings, hauled a little garbage, worked in a grocery store, ditto a dry-goods store, worked in a law office, jerked soda, worked up in a gas office, tried to be a public stenographer, packed a surveyor’s rod, worked up oil field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers, etc., etc., and also etc. . . .

Finally, Howard was moved to conclude, “And there I believe is about all the information I can give about a very humdrum and commonplace life.”

Many years later Mark Schultz, illustrator of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, recalled:

I discovered Robert E. Howard’s Conan in 1969, when I was thirteen years old. I read the stories then for their incomparable high adventure and mind-blasting horror. It wasn’t until much later that I realized they hit so hard and stayed so timeless because Howard’s feverish, passionate writing was a crystal clear reflection of a young mind in turmoil, fighting to be free of his physical surroundings.

Howard often discussed his writing with a young schoolteacher named Novalyne Price, who had literary ambitions of her own. Late in life, Price wrote a memoir of Howard entitled One Who Walked Alone (subsequently adapted into a touching motion picture, The Whole Wide World). Price recalls mentioning to Howard that she wanted to write about “real people with real problems.” Howard, however, had little interest in writing about the world he saw around him, which he once characterized as “a dreary expanse of sand drifts and post-oak thickets, checkered with sterile fields where tenant farmers toil out their hideously barren lives in fruitless labor and bitter want.” In defense of his own fiction, he asserted:

The people who read my stuff want to get away from this modern, complicated world with its hypocrisy, its cruelty, its dog-eat-dog life. . . . The civilization we live in is a lot more sinister than the time I write about. In those days, girl, men were men and women were women. They struggled to stay alive, but the struggle was worth it.

H. P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard corresponded regularly, once noted a curious paradox. Lovecraft observed that a great deal of fiction that purports to be about everyday life is actually quite often rife with sentimental distortions. Howard himself expressed a similar view: “Nobody writes realistic realism, and if they did, nobody would read it. The writers that think they write it just give their own ideas about things they think they see. The sort of man who could write realism is the fellow who never reads or writes anything.”

By way of contrast, Lovecraft defined fantasy as “an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind, frankly recognized as such; & in its own way as natural & scientific—as truly related to natural (even if uncommon & delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.” In other words, fantasy fiction makes no pretense of presenting the physical world as it actually is. However, in the right hands it can vividly delineate the most intensely felt yearnings of the human heart and soul, from the deepest longings and most dreadful anxieties to the loftiest aspirations. Therefore, it could be said that fantasy need have little to do with reality, yet have a great deal to do with truth, since these are not precisely the same thing.

This is, of course, not to say that realistic fiction cannot portray weighty abstractions such as spiritual damnation and redemption, just that fantasy can often do so more excitingly and entertainingly. The Star Wars saga of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is a perfect example: for better or worse, more people have seen the Star Wars movies than have read Crime and Punishment. Most people are more familiar with the story of Faust than of A Tale of Two Cities. Fantasy is an uncannily suitable vehicle for conveying powerful themes to a mass audience.

Novalyne Price recalled a subsequent conversation with Howard: “Bob began to talk about good and evil in life. He said that life was always a struggle between good and evil, and people like to read about that struggle. . . . He wrote for readers who wanted evil to be something big, horrible, but still something a barbarian like Conan could overcome.”

Howard’s remarks to Novalyne strongly suggest that he felt that his readers benefited in some way from seeing their struggles reflected on a higher level. To that end, Robert E. Howard took the oldest type of story—the tale of heroes, gods, and monsters—and reinvented it as jolting pulp fiction. His prose, not unlike that of Raymond Chandler, was direct and hard-edged, yet lyrical. The content of his stories was edgier as well. The horrific elements, owing in part to his association with Lovecraft, were more visceral than anything found in the European fantasy of Morris and Dunsany. Well in advance of writers like Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming, Howard was crafting sexy, violent entertainment. Unusual situations, intense moods, and heightened emotional states, prominent features of Romanticism and its Gothic subgenre, were also boldly displayed in his writing. All of which indicate that Howard understood clearly that consumers of narrative art have an innate hunger to identify with characters placed in extreme circumstances.

Howard’s modern brand of fantasy has often been characterized as “sword and sorcery,” but Lovecraft may have been more insightful when he deemed it “artificial legendry.” Howard wrote for the American working class of the early twentieth century. His readers were widely separated by time, distance, and upheaval from the myths and legends that had enthralled their ancestors in the Old World. They lived in a world rocked by cataclysm, no less than the fictional Hyborian Age of Conan had been. In 1906, the year Howard was born, the world was ruled by kings, dukes, emperors, sultans, kaisers, and czars. Twenty years later, they were all gone. The slaughter of the First World War and the lawlessness of the Roaring Twenties were followed by the malaise of the Great Depression. The Depression was a humiliating ordeal for many Americans, and Howard’s rousing tales of Conan helped to empower readers with flagging spirits. In a larger sense, however, Howard sought to resurrect the heroic saga where it had long been lost.

When America declared its independence from the Mother Country, it was also bidding farewell to Saint George and King Arthur. No comparable myths grew up to take their place. The new folk legends that appeared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution celebrated laborers and producers of goods. Today everyone has heard of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Casey Jones, and yet no one really cares about them. One needn’t marvel that no nineteenth century publisher ever attempted to use such characters to sell dime novels. Instead, stories of gunfighters and bank robbers were dime novel mainstays. “Tall tales” of how hard some guy worked were presumably less inspiring. After all, how popular would Horatio Alger’s novels have been had his protagonists simply worked but remained poor?

The dime novel was followed in the early twentieth century by the pulp magazine. At this time, radio and motion pictures were in their infancies, television yet unborn. As astonishing as it may seem today, print was the primary entertainment medium for the masses. Publishing empires were built on pulp fiction magazines that usually sold for ten cents. By the late twenties, scores of different titles were on sale at any given time. The pulp jungle proved fertile ground for a new crop of homegrown heroes: cowboys, sailors, detectives, aviators, and soldiers of fortune. Interestingly, however, such pre-eminent pulp heroes as The Shadow and Doc Savage were essentially supercops, maintainers of the status quo.

Robert E. Howard had something different in mind when he conceived of Conan. His giant barbarian is an outlaw, a sword-for-hire, basically out for himself, yet still retaining a certain knack for doing the right thing. Conan is not a preserver of order; he is a mover and shaker, the whirlwind at the center of momentous events. And though his author endowed him with a very modern hard-boiled edge, Conan remains that most immemorial of heroes, the warrior. Writing before Carl Jung was well known in America, before Joseph Campbell’s work had appeared, Howard possessed an instinctive grasp of mythic, archetypal figures—king, warrior, magician, femme fatale. He knew that the ancient figure of the warrior would resonate on a deeper, more subconscious level than, for example, the detective, a figure in some ways emblematic of the Age of Reason.

Howard’s vivid “artificial legendry” has often been dismissed as “escapism.” Yet if the lot of the average man is truly one of “drab monotony and toil,” as Howard believed, it falls to the skald and the storyteller to furnish refreshment for tired minds and nourishment for the soul. Critics like Robert McKee have theorized that it is the structure of “the story” that enables a person to see his own life as something other than a chaotic jumble of trivial incidents. In the heroic saga, scintillating vistas of human potential are glimpsed. The blinders fall away; shades of gray sharpen into vibrant color. One comes away from such visions with a sense of one’s own stature enhanced. This is not escape, but liberation. Howard brought a renewed vigor and freshness to the heroic saga, making it more vital and relevant to the sort of modern reader most in need of a widened vista.

In truth, the average working adult does endure his or her fair share of drudgery. The majority of people earn a living by means of tedious jobs, not rewarding careers. Herein lies a clue to Howard’s well-known resentment of “civilization,” for which the author has taken so much flak. Youngsters are told they can become anything they want if they try hard enough; they are never told how many waiters the world needs for every archeologist it can support. Viewed from this perspective, civilized society is like a big lottery in which most people have to lose. Countless individuals are relegated to inane tasks that oppress the spirit, ruin the body, and dull the mind. Consider the doorman stationed in front of a luxury hotel, or the low-level office clerk hunched over paperwork for long hours in a sterile cubicle. To Howard, such individuals would be better off, spiritually if not materially, wearing loincloths and carrying spears, battling openly against man and nature.

Safe and secure but unfulfilled within the folds of civilization, the adventurous among us grow restless. Bold individuals seek out ways to test and challenge themselves. Examples of this can be found at every level of society, from the mountaineer scaling a peak “because it is there” to the teenage street racer. Howard once told Lovecraft:

Despite the tinsel and show, the artificial adjuncts, and the sometimes disgusting advertisements, ballyhoo and exploitation attendant upon such sports as boxing and football, there is, in the actual contests, something vital and real and deep-rooted in the very life-springs of the race. . . . Football, for instance, is nothing less than war in miniature, and provides an excellent way of working off pugnacious and combative instincts, without bloodshed.

One can experience a fleeting taste of glory through some form of athletic striving, either first hand or vicariously as a spectator. One can also experience a heightened sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment vicariously through art. Whatever the case, a transcendental experience is sought. There is a yearning to transcend the coarseness and banality of everyday life. Championship football and soccer games are often followed by raucous partying and even rioting, owing to the fact that most of the spectators lead exceedingly humdrum lives. Ordinary day-to-day existence all too often consists largely of slogging through a morass of inane tasks, stifling worries, and petty squabbles.

Howard endeavored to offer his readers a loftier perspective. He understood that selling window blinds, or drilling holes in sheet metal all week, or working at the rent-a-car counter at the airport is not enough to fill a man’s heart. That is one reason he so excelled at depicting struggles that were epic, against evils that were truly horrific. Such is the essence of adventure, and Howard has widely been lauded as a great adventure writer. The path of the adventurer leads to glory or doom, but it skirts commonplace tedium and the gradual grinding down of the human spirit by the weight of the world. In its way, the adventure story is a subversive art form in the sense that it carries within it the implicit suggestion that everyday life is inadequate.

There is a human tendency to invest events like holidays, graduations, and weddings with an atmosphere of pomp and grandeur. This involves the use of the creative imagination in a manner not so different from the way the storyteller weaves his tales. “There was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living,” wrote Howard concerning times gone by: “All empty show and the smoke of conceit and arrogance, but what a drab thing life would be without them.” For him, there is no meaning or beauty in life other than what we dream into it.

In this and other respects, Howard could be considered an early existential writer. The term “existentialism” derives from its central tenet that “existence precedes essence,” a terse definition that calls for clarification. Existentialism asserts that humans do not come into being for any special or specific purpose. Instead, one determines one’s own “essential nature” through one’s actions. It is basically an atheistic philosophy, although some philosophers have been able to reconcile it with faith. In either case, responsibility for creating goals, values, and meaning rests on human shoulders. Meaning in life is something that must be created, rather than discovered. Many commentators chose to dwell on the negative implications of existential philosophy, making much ado about “the meaninglessness of life” and “the absurdity of human existence.” There is no meaning to be found in the vast universe beyond ourselves.

Existentialism brought into sharper focus a number of themes, ideas, motifs, and subtexts that had been cropping up with increasing frequency in literature and art during the early decades of the twentieth century. These could be found in popular art as well as fine art, even if the former remained beneath the radar of most intellectuals until comparatively recently. The works of both Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft reflect some aspect of existential thought. Thomas R. Reid has duly noted that Howard and Lovecraft “write in archetypal terms, of man’s struggle against chaos and destruction. Howard’s primordial heroes most often win, Lovecraft’s are invariably crushed or emotionally maimed. In either case the statement of man’s position is the same. From a position of utter inferiority, man must deal with the degrading and degenerate manifestations of the world in which he lives.” In Conan we see the consummate self-determining man, alone in a hostile universe.

Serving Time in Disillusionment

Conan’s world is one of both breathtaking wonder and blood-freezing horror. There are exotic kingdoms and gleaming citadels, but also foreboding hinterlands and mysterious ruins haunted by nightmarish specters. Fabulous wealth in the form of gold and precious gemstones lies in heaps for the taking, if one is bold enough to dare the terrors that lurk in the nearby shadows. Monstrous fifty-foot serpents rear up, fangs dripping venom. Giant slavering apes snarl and lurch forward with taloned hands extended. Yet even these terrors can be overcome by the craft, audacity, sinew, and fighting prowess of a fierce barbarian warrior. And gold is not his only reward. Alluring women await; some are slave girls, some are princesses, some are warriors in their own right, but all are almost agonizing in their physical perfection.

For daring to conjure such fever dreams, Howard has at times been labeled an “arrested adolescent” by his harsher critics. However, such critics tend to be familiar with only a small portion of Howard’s work. Howard lavished whatever exuberance and love of life he possessed upon his most famous creation, leaving precious little for himself or most of his other characters.

In The Shadow Kingdom, King Kull broods on his throne, grappling with philosophical abstractions. Red Shadows introduced the dour fanatic Solomon Kane. In The Dark Man, Black Turlogh O’Brien fatalistically smites his enemies in the grip of a berserker rage. Worms of the Earth tells the tragic tale of Bran Mak Morn, who consorts with dark forces in an effort to save his dying race. The crusaders of Howard’s historical stories are not knights in shining armor, but brutal men in dirty chain mail vying for power over small medieval fiefdoms.

Howard himself was buffeted by severe mood swings. He took his own life at the youthful age of thirty. While only in his early twenties, he was writing poetry redolent of world-weariness, loss, and ennui. In one such poem, “Always Comes Evening,” he laments, “. . . my road runs out in thistles and my dreams have turned to dust. . . .” More than once, he speaks of the bone-crushing weight of age pressing upon him, even as he admits he is young in actual years: “I fling aside the cloak of Youth and limp / A withered man upon a broken staff.” Far from being an “arrested adolescent,” Robert E. Howard was, if anything, a premature middle-aged burnout.

Howard gave considerable credence to the doctrine of reincarnation, and this undoubtedly contributed to his view of himself as an “old soul.” Possible former incarnations notwithstanding, however, he did not live out even a single normal life span. Even so, he experienced his share of strife and conflict. This was not in the form of physical combat, but instead resulted from his struggle with his surroundings. Howard confided to Lovecraft:

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments. I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand I am not criticizing these environments. They were good, solid, and worthy. The fact that they were not inducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Nevertheless, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast.

As a youngster, Howard was introverted and sensitive with a tendency to brood over real or imagined slights by others. He undertook a rigorous bodybuilding program that gained him a powerful physique as an adult. He informed his father that, “I entered in to build my body until when a scoundrel crosses me up, I can with my bare hands tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back with my hands alone.” Growing up, he became increasingly resentful of authority: “I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn’t the work I minded . . . what I hated was the confinement—the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.” Howard took up writing as a profession in large part because it enabled him to be his own boss: “I worked in a gas office, but lost the job because I wouldn’t kow-tow to my employer and ‘yes’ him from morning to night. That’s one reason I was never very successful working for people. So many men think an employee is a kind of servant.”

All these things contributed to Howard’s premature burnout. Possessed of a dominant personality, he was given to butting heads with people and situations with which he felt himself at odds. Essentially, he was fighting the whole damn world, and over time this took its toll. Hence his feelings of world-weariness and futility.

In a larger sense, however, Howard’s disillusionment differs from that of the average person only in degree. Everyone experiences some form of unrequited longing or thwarted ambition. Disappointment is a fact of life, an inevitability known to all. For the more sensitive, disappointment is shadowed by disillusionment. There is a vague sense of resentment that life has somehow played one false. Often this is dismissed with the commonplace observation that things aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. But in Howard’s prose, as well as his poetry, disillusionment has a way of becoming magnified.

From time to time, Howard writes of some glorious dream that only serves to conceal a hideous underlying reality. In such passages, he feels moved to portray disillusionment on a grand, even cosmic, scale. For Howard’s heroes it is often the result of a single, sudden horrifying revelation, rather than merely stemming from the accumulation of numerous minor disappointments. Portrayed thusly, it is another example of Howard’s penchant for depicting ordinary human struggle on a mythical level. All pervasive, disillusionment enfolds humanity like some form of original sin. Not even Conan can escape it.

In classic mythology, the hero’s journey often entails a descent to the underworld and communion with the dead. In The Hour of the Dragon, Conan delves deep beneath the shadow-guarded tombs of Stygia. There he meets the Princess Akivasha, who lived ten thousand years earlier and is celebrated in myth the world over. According to her legend, she trafficked with dark forces to remain young and beautiful forever. When she attempts to seduce him, Conan learns that Akivasha is a vampire, an unclean parasitic monster. As he escapes her lair, he is nearly overwhelmed with despair:

The legend of Akivasha was so old, and among the evil tales told of her ran a thread of beauty and idealism, of everlasting youth. To so many dreamers and poets and lovers she was not alone the evil princess of Stygian legend, but the symbol of eternal youth and beauty, shining for ever in some far realm of the gods. And this was the hideous reality. This foul perversion was the truth of that everlasting life. Through his physical revulsion ran the sense of a shattered dream of man’s idolatry, its gleaming gold proved slime and cosmic filth. A wave of futility swept over him, a dim fear of the falseness of all men’s dreams and idolatries.

Frequently, Conan encounters beings whose capacity for evil or depravity exceeds that of mere mortals. It’s all part of a heroic saga of ordeals and triumphs surpassing those to be found in the course of ordinary, everyday life. And if there is no escaping disillusionment, Conan must experience disillusionment on an epic scale.

Thomas R. Reid has pointed out that, “One does not have to search long among extant epic works to find others which parallel underlying themes in both Lovecraft and Howard. In Norse mythology, one is confronted with a cosmology in which defeat is inevitable. Man’s and the gods’ transitory victories are tempered by the foreknowledge of total defeat.” Reid concludes that Howard’s fiction expresses “the ancient and yet increasingly modern belief that man exists in a hostile world. . . .”

“We of North Europe had gods and demons before which the pallid mythologies of the South fade to childishness,” proclaims the Irish-American narrator of one of Howard’s horror stories, who goes on to add, “In the southern lands the sun shines and flowers bloom; under the soft skies men laugh at demons. But in the North, who can say what elemental spirits of evil dwell in the fierce storms and the darkness?”

Howard’s view of the Northern myths was shared by Edith Hamilton, who duly noted:

The world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a grave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know that a day will come when they will be destroyed. Sometime they will meet their enemies and go down beneath them to defeat and death. Asgard will fall in ruins. . . . Nevertheless, the gods will fight for it to the end. . . .

This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has given birth to. The only sustaining support possible, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attain, is heroism. . . .

Bleakness, futility, and the inevitable passing of all things are part of the world-view of Robert E. Howard. The Gray God Passes was inspired by an actual historical event, the Battle of Clontarf, which Howard transformed into his personal vision of Twilight of the Gods. In it, the Celtic warrior Black Turlogh laments, “The days of the twilight come on amain, and a strange feeling is upon me as of a waning age. What are we all, too, but ghosts waning into the night?” Such somber notes give Howard’s tales a resonance lacking in the works of his imitators. It could be said that many readers come to Robert E. Howard for the action, adventure, thrills and horror to be found in his stories, but they stay for the dark, turbulent undercurrent that runs just beneath their surface.

Meaning is only possible through heroic struggle. David Weber offered these cogent observations:

. . . Bran Mak Morn fights for his people’s last chance for greatness and their vengeance upon their supplanters. Kull struggles to impose his own clear, barbarian’s sense of justice in place of the decadent, bureaucratic legalisms of Valusia. Black Turlogh O’Brien, outlawed and cast out by his own clan, sets out on a suicide mission to rescue a kidnapped maiden whose family would spit upon him, if they didn’t try to kill him outright. These are very human characters, with senses of honor which may be flawed but remain unbreakable, and while the irresistible force of darkness may bear down upon them, they snatch their occasional personal victories from its jaws.

In Robert E. Howard’s heroic tales, the fatalism of the old Nordic sagas is tempered by modern existential thought. Purpose is not to be found without, in the cold hostile universe that surrounds us, but within. Howard himself found meaning not in “the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas” in which he walked alone, but in the dreams and visions that stirred within him. One imposes meaning on the world through one’s actions, and even when one’s actions are lost to time, they are never insignificant. In The Valley of the Worm, Niord’s name and actual deeds are long since forgotten, but the significance of his triumph is celebrated in song and story the world over. Howard’s own heroic deed was to take up the profession of the writer, so little understood in his time and place, and bring his visions to the world.

To understand, and perhaps realize, one’s own heroic potential, one must look beyond the everyday. In times past, men sought shelter from the cold and darkness without to warm themselves at fires. In times to come, new generations of readers will warm and reinvigorate themselves with the modern myths of Robert E. Howard.

A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard

by Rusty Burke

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) ranks among the greatest writers of adventure stories. The creator of Conan the Cimmerian, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Francis X. Gordon (“El Borak”), Sailor Steve Costigan, Breckenridge Elkins, and many other memorable characters, Howard, during a writing career that spanned barely a dozen years, had well over a hundred stories published in the pulp magazines of his day, chiefly Weird Tales, but including Action Stories, Argosy, Fight Stories, Oriental Stories, Spicy Adventure, Sport Story, Strange Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Top Notch, and a number of others. His stories consistently proved popular with the readers, for they are powerfully vivid adventures, with colorful, larger-than-life heroes and compelling, rivetting prose that grabs the reader from the first paragraph and sweeps him along to the thrilling conclusion. So great was the appeal of Howard’s storytelling that it continues to capture new generations of readers and inspire many of the finest writers of fantasy and adventure.

Robert E. Howard was born on January 22, 1906, in the “fading little ex-cowtown” of Peaster, Texas, in Parker County, just west of Fort Worth. The Howards had been living in neighboring Palo Pinto County, on the banks of Dark Valley Creek, and returned there soon after their son was born. It is not known why Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and his wife, Hester Jane Ervin Howard, moved to the somewhat larger community. Dr. Howard may have thought to find a practice that did not entail lengthy absences from home, or perhaps moved his wife temporarily to the larger community so that she would have readier access to medical care when her pregnancy came to term. Hester Jane Ervin Howard, Robert’s mother, did not enjoy robust health, to put it mildly: there was a history of tuberculosis in her family, and Mrs. Howard was sickly for much of Robert’s life. Isaac Howard was a country doctor, a profession which often meant being away from home for days at a time. Thus he may have wished to be certain that his wife of two years, experiencing her first pregnancy in her mid-thirties, would have adequate medical attention when she delivered their first, and as it happened, only child.

Isaac Howard seems to have been possessed of a combination of wanderlust and ambition that led him to move his family frequently in search of better opportunities. By the time he was eight, Robert had lived in at least seven different, widely scattered Texas towns. Finally, in 1915, the family moved to the community of Cross Cut, in Brown County, and they would live in this vicinity, with moves to Burkett (in Coleman County) in 1917 and finally to Cross Plains (Callahan County) in 1919, for the rest of Robert’s and his mother’s lives.

Cross Plains in the 1920s was a small town of approximately 2,000 souls, give or take a thousand, but like much of the Central West Texas region, it went through periodic oil booms. Two town-site booms, in particular, brought hundreds, perhaps thousands, of temporary inhabitants who set up camps just outside the town limits, jammed the hotels to capacity, and rented rooms or beds in private homes. The lease men, riggers, drillers, tool dressers, and roughnecks who followed the oil were followed in their turn by those who sought to exploit them for profit, from men or women who set up temporary hamburger stands to feed them, to gamblers and prostitutes who provided “recreation,” to thugs, thieves and con men who simply preyed on them. An oil boom could transform a sleepy little community into a big city in no time at all, in those days: when oil was discovered in Ranger, Texas (about 40 miles from Cross Plains) in 1917, the population increased from 1,000 to 30,000 in less than a year, and similar growth was reported in nearby Breckenridge. Cross Plains never saw anything like that kind of growth, but certainly the few thousand who did come transformed it into a wilder and rowdier town than usual. One resident recalls her family driving into town on Saturday night just to watch people, hoping fights would break out. They were rarely disappointed. Of the atmosphere in a boom town, Howard wrote: “I’ll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that Life’s a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.” Just as quickly as the town grew, however, it could decline: when the oil played out, the speculators and oil-field workers and their camp-followers moved on. The influence of this boom-and-bust cycle on Howard’s later ideas about the growth and decline of civilization has often been overlooked.

Bob Howard attended the local high school, where he was remembered as polite and reserved, and to make pocket money he worked at a variety of jobs, including hauling trash, picking up and delivering laundry for dry-cleaners, clerking in stores, loading freight at the train station, and other odd jobs. He had some close friends among the local boys, but there seem to have been none who shared his literary interests.

Bob’s literary interests had probably been encouraged from an early age by his mother, an ardent poetry lover. He was an avid reader, claiming even to have raided schoolhouses during the summer in his quest for books. While this story is probably hyperbolic, it does give an indication of his thirst for reading material, which was a rare commodity in the communities in which the Howards lived, most of which had no libraries, much less bookstores. Bob seems to have had an extraordinary ability to read quickly and to remember what he had read. His friends recall their astonishment at his ability to pick up a book in the library or a store or someone’s house, to quickly turn the pages and run his eyes over them, faster than they thought anyone could actually be reading, and later to be able to relate to them with perfect clarity what he had read. His library, presented by his father to Howard Payne College after his death, reveals the breadth of his interests: history and fiction are dominant, but also represented are biography, sports, poetry, anthropology, Texana, and erotica. Near the end of his life he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft:

My favorite writers are A. Conan Doyle, Jack London, Mark Twain, Sax Rohmer, Jeffery Farnol, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, R. W. Chambers, Rider Haggard, Kipling, Sir Walter Scott, [Stanley] Lane-Poole, Jim Tully, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft. For poetry, I like Robert W. Service, Kipling, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, [Robert] Vansittart, Sidney Lanier, Edgar Allan Poe, the Benets—Stephen Vincent better than William Rose—Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Francis Ledwedge, Omar Khayyam, Joe Moncure March, Nathalia Crane, Henry Herbert Knibbs, Lord Dunsany, G. K. Chesterton, Bret Harte, Oscar Wilde, Longfellow, Tennyson, Swinburne, [George Sylvester] Viereck, Alfred Noyes, and Lovecraft.

In addition to his reading, Bob Howard had a passion for oral storytelling. It is well attested that he frequently told his stories aloud as he typed them: his neighbors reported that they sometimes had difficulty sleeping at night because of the racket Howard was making. His youthful buddies in Cross Cut remember that he liked to have them all play out stories he made up, and the literary friends of his adulthood recall being often enthralled by the stories he would tell when they were together. He seemed never to tire of telling stories, though he generally would not relate a tale he was actually writing: he told Novalyne Price that once the story was told, he had difficulty getting it on paper. Sometimes, however, his oral stories were the inspiration or basis for the stories he would write. He loved, too, to listen to others tell stories: in his letters he relates how as a young boy he was thrilled and terrified by the ghost tales of a former slave, and those of his grandmother. Novalyne Price remembers him sitting riveted by the stories of her grandmother, and that he loved to find old-timers who could relate tales of pioneer days. It may well be the quality of the oral story, the well-spun yarn, that makes Howard’s stories so enthralling.

Howard seems to have determined upon a literary career at an early age. In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft he says that his first story was written when he was “nine or ten,” and a former postmistress at Burkett recalls that he began writing stories about this time and expressed an intention of becoming a writer. He submitted his first story for professional publication when he was but 15, and his first professional sale, Spear and Fang, was made at age 18. Howard always insisted that he chose writing as his profession simply because it gave him the freedom to be his own boss:

“I’ve always had a honing to make my living by writing, ever since I can remember, and while I haven’t been a howling success in that line, at least I’ve managed for several years now to get by without grinding at some time clock-punching job. There’s freedom in this game; that’s the main reason I chose it.”

The Cross Plains school only went through tenth grade during Bob Howard’s day, but he needed to complete the eleventh grade to qualify for college admission. Therefore, in the fall of 1922 Bob and his mother moved to Brownwood, a larger town that served as the county seat for Brown County, so that he could finish high school there. It was there that he met Truett Vinson and Clyde Smith, who would remain his friends until the end of his life: they were the first of his friends to share and encourage his interest in literature and writing. Smith, in particular, shared much of Howard’s literary taste, and the two encouraged each other in writing poetry. Also at Brownwood High, Howard enjoyed his first appearances as a published author: two of his stories won cash prizes and publication in the high school paper, The Tattler, December 22, 1922, and three more were printed during the spring term.

After his graduation from high school, Howard returned to Cross Plains. His father, in particular, wanted him to attend college, perhaps hoping that he, too, would become a physician. But Bob had little aptitude for and no interest in science. He also claimed a passionate hatred for school. As he wrote later to Lovecraft: “I hated school as I hate the memory of school. It wasn’t the work I minded; I had no trouble learning the tripe they dished out in the way of lessons—except arithmetic, and I might have learned that if I’d gone to the trouble of studying it. I wasn’t at the head of my classes—except in history—but I wasn’t at the foot either. I generally did just enough work to keep from flunking the courses, and I don’t regret the loafing I did. But what I hated was the confinement—the clock-like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to question my actions and interfere with my thoughts.”

Although he did eventually take courses at the Howard Payne Commercial School, these were business courses—stenography, typing, and a program in bookkeeping; despite his interest in history, anthropology, and literature, Howard never took college courses in these subjects. During the period from his high school graduation in spring of 1923 to his completion of the bookkeeping program in the spring of 1927, he continued writing. Although he finally made his first professional sale during this period, when Weird Tales accepted Spear and Fang, he also accumulated many rejection slips. Further, because most of his early sales were to Weird Tales, which paid upon publication, rather than acceptance, he found that the money was not coming in as he might have liked. He therefore took a variety of jobs during these years. He tried reporting oil-field news, but found he did not like interviewing people he did not know or like about a topic that did not interest him. He tried stenography, both in a law office and as an independent public stenographer, but found he was not particularly good at it and did not like it. He worked as an assistant to an oil-field geologist, and while he did enjoy the work, he one day collapsed in the fearsome Texas summer heat, which led him to fear that he had heart problems (it was later learned that his heart had a mild tendency to race under stress), so he was just as glad when the survey ended and the geologist left town. He spent several months as a soda jerk and counterman at the Cross Plains Drug Store, a job that he actively detested, and which required so much of his time that he had little left over for writing or recreation. Thus he made a pact with his father: he would take the course in bookkeeping at the Howard Payne Academy, following which he would have one year to try to make a success of his writing. If at the end of that year he was not making it, he would try to find a bookkeeping job.

During the summer of 1927, Bob Howard met Harold Preece, who would be an important friend and correspondent for the next few years. It was Preece who encouraged Bob’s interest in Irish and Celtic history and legend: he had earlier shown some interest in the subject, and now, inspired by Preece’s enthusiasm, it would become an active passion. He also met, the same weekend, Booth Mooney, who would become the editor of a literary circular, The Junto, to which Howard, Preece, Clyde Smith, Truett Vinson, and others contributed over a period of about two years.

After completing the bookkeeping course, Howard set about in earnest the business of becoming a writer. By early 1928, it was clear that he was going to be able to succeed in this, and indeed he never again worked at any other job. Weird Tales had published two Howard stories in 1925, one in 1926, and one (plus two poems) in 1927. In 1928 they would publish four stories (including the first Solomon Kane tale, Red Shadows) and five poems. From January 1928 until his death in June 1936, Howard stories or verse appeared in nearly three of every four issues of Weird Tales.

Several critics have noted that Howard’s writing can be divided into “periods.” Though they overlap to a degree, these periods, which seemed to last two to three years each, may reveal something about Howard’s writing style and methods. The most well-defined periods are those during which he wrote boxing stories, culminating in the Steve Costigan series; heroic fantasy stories, culminating with Conan; oriental adventure stories, culminating with the El Borak tales; and western stories—he was still “in” this period at his death. A close reading of Howard’s letters and stories, and placement of these along a timeline, reveals that he would develop an interest in a subject, read about it avidly, immerse himself in it so thoroughly that he virtually adopted a new identity (a persona, the “voice” through which a writer speaks, not to be confused with the writer’s own personality), whereupon he would begin, at first tentatively and then with increasing confidence and vigor, to write about the subject in this new “voice.” Although something of the pattern can be seen from his early writing, it is most vivid beginning with his “boxing” persona, Steve Costigan.

Howard’s passion for boxing is attested as early as age nine. He boxed with his friends at any opportunity, and in his late teens may have occasionally assisted in promoting fights at local clubs in Cross Plains. While working at the soda fountain at the Cross Plains Drug Store, he developed a friendship with one oil-field worker who introduced him to the amateur fighters at the local ice house, and he became a frequent participant in these bouts. Between 1925 (at the latest) and 1928, he put himself through a weight and strength program, and took on really heroic proportions. He read avidly about prizefighters, and attended fights whenever and wherever he could. By early 1929 he had begun writing and submitting boxing stories, though his first efforts mingled boxing with weird themes. (This was another of his patterns: when trying out a new literary field, he would often use characters, settings or themes with which he was already comfortable.) With the first Steve Costigan story, The Pit of the Serpent, in the July 1929 Fight Stories, he had found a market that would prove as steady for him as Weird Tales, at least until the Depression knocked out Fight Stories and its companion magazine, Action Stories, in 1932.

The same weekend he met Harold Preece in Austin, Howard had bought a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s book-length epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, which brings together Celts, Romanized Britons, and Anglo-Saxons under King Alfred in a battle of Christians against the heathen Danish and Norse invaders of the ninth century. Howard enthusiastically praised the poem in letters to Clyde Smith, sharing lengthy passages. It apparently inspired him to begin work on The Ballad of King Geraint, in which he brings together representatives of various Celtic peoples of early Britain in a valiant “last stand” against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Chesterton’s idea of “telescoping history,” that “it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment,” must have appealed to Howard greatly, for this is precisely what he did in many of his fantasy adventures, particularly in his creation of Conan’s Hyborian Age, in which we find represented many different historical eras and cultures, from medieval Europe (Aquilonia and Poitain) to the American frontier (the Pictish Wilderness and its borderlands), from Cossacks (the Kozaki) to Elizabethan pirates (the Free Brotherhood). Howard “mix(ed) up the centuries while preserving the sentiment”: this “telescoping” allowed him to portray what he saw as universal elements of human nature and historical patterns, as well as giving him virtually all of human history for a playground.

When Howard discovered that Harold Preece shared his enthusiasm for matters Celtic, he entered into his “Celtic” phase with his customary brio. His letters to Preece and to Clyde Smith from 1928 to 1930 are full of discussions of Irish history, legend, and poetry—he even taught himself a smattering of Irish Gaelic, and began exploring his genealogy in earnest (though he had a pronounced tendency to overstate the Irishness of his ancestry). Irish and Celtic themes came to dominate his poetry, and by 1930 he was ready to try out this new persona with fiction. In keeping with his general tendency to use older work as a springboard to the new, he first introduced an Irish character into a story featuring two earlier creations—Cormac of Connacht is often overlooked as one of the Kings of the Night, overshadowed by the teaming up of Bran Mak Morn and King Kull, but the story is told from the Irish king’s point of view. During 1930 Howard wrote a number of stories featuring Gaelic heroes, nearly all of them outlawed by clan and country.

In June 1930 Howard received a letter from Farnsworth Wright informing him that Weird Tales planned to launch a companion magazine dealing with oriental fiction, and asking him to contribute. This request rekindled the author’s avid interest in the Orient, particularly the Middle East, and he produced some of his finest stories for the new magazine (originally titled Oriental Stories, later Magic Carpet). But while these stories were set during the Crusades, or periods of Mongol or Islamic conquests, they inevitably featured Celtic heroes.

Also in June 1930, Howard wrote to Farnsworth Wright in praise of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls, which had just been reprinted in Weird Tales. In the letter, he noted the use of a phrase in Gaelic, suggesting that Lovecraft might hold to a minority view on the settling of the British Isles. Wright sent the letter on to Lovecraft, who frankly had not supposed when he wrote the story that anyone would notice the liberty he had taken with his archaic language. He wrote to Howard to set the record straight, and so began what is surely one of the great correspondence cycles in all of fantasy literature. For the next six years, Howard and Lovecraft debated the merits of civilization versus barbarism, cities and society versus the frontier, the mental versus the physical, art versus commerce, and other subjects. At first Howard was very deferential to Lovecraft, whom he (like many of his colleagues) considered the pre-eminent writer of weird fiction of the day. But gradually Howard came to assert his own views more forcefully, and eventually could even direct withering sarcasm toward Lovecraft’s views, as when he noted how “civilized” Italy was in bombing Ethiopia.

These letters provide a vast store of information on Howard’s travels and activities during these years, as well as his views on many subjects, and in them we see the development of the persona that would come increasingly to dominate Howard’s fiction and letters in the last part of his life, “The Texican” (a term used for Texans prior to statehood). Lovecraft, and later August Derleth, with whom Howard also began corresponding, strongly encouraged Howard’s growing interests in regional history and lore, as did E. Hoffmann Price, with whom Howard was already corresponding in 1930 and who was the only writer of the Weird Tales group to actually meet him in person. It is unfortunate that this persona did not have a chance to develop fully by the time of Howard’s death. The evidence of his letters suggests that he might have become a great western writer.

Even before Howard bought his own car in 1932, he and his parents had made many trips to various parts of Texas, to visit friends and relatives, and for his mother’s health, which was in serious decline. After he bought his car, he continued to travel with his parents, but made a few trips with his friends, such as Lindsey Tyson and Truett Vinson. His travels ranged from Fort Worth to the Rio Grande Valley, from the East Texas oil fields to New Mexico. His letters to Lovecraft contain a good deal of description and discussion of the geography and history of these places, and are highly entertaining in their own right, apart from being windows into Howard’s life.

In 1934, a new schoolteacher arrived in Cross Plains who was to become a major force in Bob Howard’s life. Bob had met Novalyne Price a little over a year previously, when introduced to her by their mutual friend Clyde Smith. Upon moving to Cross Plains, Novalyne made several attempts to call Bob, only to be told by his mother that he could not come to the phone, or was out of town. At last tiring of these excuses, she talked her cousin into giving her a ride to the Howard home, where she was greeted stand-offishly by his father but warmly by Bob. This was the beginning of a sometimes romantic, sometimes stormy relationship. For the first time, Bob had someone locally who shared his interests—and she was a woman! But his closeness to his mother, particularly his insistence upon attending to her in her illness, which Novalyne thought he should hire a nurse to do, rankled Novalyne, as did his refusal to attend social events. Marriage often entered their minds, and was even occasionally discussed—but the two never entertained the same feelings at the same time. When she would think she was in love, he would insist he needed his freedom. When he thought he was ready for love, she saw only the differences in their attitudes toward socializing. They were two headstrong, passionate, assertive personalities, which made for an interesting relationship, but one that was impossible to sustain. Their relationship became strained when Novalyne started dating others, including Howard’s friend Truett Vinson.

Through 1935 and 1936, Howard’s mother’s health was in rapid decline. More and more frequently Robert had to take her to sanitariums and hospitals, and even though Dr. Howard received a courtesy discount on services, the medical bills began to mount. Bob was faced with a dilemma: his need for money was more pressing than ever, but he had little time in which to write. Weird Tales owed him around $800, and payments were slow. Dr. Howard, his own meager savings exhausted, moved his practice to his home, so that patients came in and out all day and night. Father and son finally tried hiring women to nurse and keep house, further filling the house with people. Bob could find no time to be alone with his writing. This, and the despair he felt as his mother inexorably slid toward death, created enormous stress for the young writer. He resurrected an apparently longstanding plan not to outlive his mother.

This was no impulsive act. For years, he had told associates such as Clyde Smith that he would kill himself were it not that his mother needed him. Much of his poetry, most of it written during the 1920s and early 1930s, clearly and forcefully reflects his suicidal ideation. He was not at all enamored with life for its own sake, seeing it only as weary, gruelling toil at the behest of others, with scant chance of success and precious little freedom. A 1931 letter to Farnsworth Wright contains several statements of common Howard themes: “Like the average man, the tale of my life would merely be a dull narration of drab monotony and toil, a grinding struggle against poverty. . . . . I’ll say one thing about an oil boom; it will teach a kid that life’s a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of. . . . Life’s not worth living if somebody thinks he’s in authority over you. . . I’m merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies. . . . Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it’s all in the game, I reckon.”

His letters frequently express the feeling that he was a misfit in a cold and hostile world: “The older I grow the more I sense the senseless unfriendly attitude of the world at large.” In nearly all his fiction, the characters are misfits, outcasts, aliens in a world that is hostile to them. One wonders if the early childhood experience of being uprooted on a regular basis, as Dr. Howard gambled on one boom town after another—the Howards had at least eight different residences, scattered all over Texas, before Robert was nine years old—may have contributed to this feeling of being an outsider in an inhospitable land.

In some of his letters to Lovecraft he expressed another variation on this theme: the feeling that he was somehow born out of his proper time. He frequently bemoaned the fate that had him born too late to have participated in the taming of the frontier. “I only wish I had been born earlier—thirty years earlier, anyway. As it was I only caught the tag end of a robust era, when I was too young to realize its meaning. When I look down the vista of the years, with all the ‘improvements,’ ‘inventions’ and ‘progress’ that they hold, I am infinitely thankful that I am no younger. I could wish to be older, much older. Every man wants to live out his life’s span. But I hardly think life in this age is worth the effort of living. I’d like to round out my youth; and perhaps the natural vitality and animal exuberance of youth will carry me to middle age. But good God, to think of living the full three score years and ten!”

Howard also seems to have had an abhorrence of the idea of growing old and infirm. A month before his death he’d written to August Derleth: “Death to the old is inevitable, and yet somehow I often feel that it is a greater tragedy than death to the young. When a man dies young he misses much suffering, but the old have only life as a possession and somehow to me the tearing of a pitiful remnant from weak fingers is more tragic than the looting of a life in its full rich prime. I don’t want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health.”

For a young man, Howard seems to have had an exaggerated sense of growing old. When he was only twenty-four he wrote to Harold Preece, “I am haunted by the realization that my best days, mental and physical, lie behind me.” Novalyne Price recalls that during the time they were dating, in 1934-35, Bob often said that he was in his “sere and yellow leaf,” echoing a phrase from Macbeth: “I have lived long enough, my way of life / Is fal’n into the sere, the yellow leaf. . . .”

Also in his May 1936 letter to Derleth, Howard mentioned that “I haven’t written a weird story for nearly a year, though I’ve been contemplating one dealing with Coronado’s expedition on the Staked Plains in 1541.” This suggests that Nekht Semerkeht may well have been the last story Howard started, and if so, it is of interest here, in that it dwells upon the idea of suicide. “The game is not worth the candle,” thinks the hero, de Guzman:

[Man] fondles his favorite delusion that he is guided wholly by reason, even when reason tells him it is better to die than to live. It is not the intellect he boasts that bids him live, but the blind, black, unreasoning beast-instinct.

This de Guzman knew and admitted. He did not try to deceive himself into believing that there was any intellectual reason why he should not give up the agonizing struggle, place the muzzle of a pistol to his head and quit an existence whose savor had long ago become less than its pain.

And in the end, it may be that stress played an important role in his decision to take his own life. His mother’s worsening illness had necessitated frequent absences from home, to take her to medical facilities in other parts of the state, and even when the Howards were home, Bob had little uninterrupted time, or peace, in which to write. He worried constantly about his mother. It may be that a complex array of forces coalesced to convince him of the futility of existence, and to impel him to take a long-contemplated course of action.

Howard planned for his death very carefully. He made arrangements with his agent, Otis Kline, for the handling of his stories in the event of his death. He carefully put together the manuscripts he had not yet submitted to Weird Tales or the Kline agency, with instructions on where they were to be sent. He borrowed a gun, a .380 Colt automatic, from a friend who was unaware of his plans. Dr. Howard may have hidden Bob’s own guns, aware of what he might be contemplating. He said that he had seen his son make preparations on earlier occasions when it appeared Mrs. Howard might die. He said that he was trying to keep an eye on his son, but that he did not expect him to act before his mother died.

Hester Howard sank into her final coma about the 8th of June, 1936. Bob asked Dr. J. W. Dill, who had come to be with Dr. Howard during his wife’s final illness, whether anyone had been known to live after being shot through the brain. Unaware of Bob’s plan, the doctor told him that such an injury meant certain death.

Dr. Howard related that Robert had disarmed him of his intentions the night before, assuming “an almost cheerful attitude”: “He came to me in the night, put his arm around me and said, buck up, you are equal to it, you will go through it all right.” He did not know, he said, that on the morning of the 11th, Robert asked the nurse attending Mrs. Howard if she thought his mother would ever regain consciousness, and that the nurse had told him she would not.

He then left the room, and was next seen leaving the house and getting into his car. The cook he and his father had hired said later that, looking through the kitchen window, she saw him raise his hands in prayer, though what looked to her like prayer may have been holding up the gun. She heard a shot, and saw Robert slump over the steering wheel. She screamed. Dr. Howard and Dr. Dill ran out to the car and carried Bob back into the house. Both were country doctors, and they knew that no one could live with the kind of injury Bob had sustained. He had shot himself above the right ear, the bullet emerging on the left side.

Robert Howard’s robust health allowed him to survive this terrible wound for almost eight hours. He died at about 4:00 in the afternoon, Thursday, June 11, 1936, without ever regaining consciousness. His mother died the following day, also without regaining consciousness. A double funeral was held on June 14, and the mother and son were transported to Brownwood for burial.

A four-line stanza was found and said to be the last thing Robert E. Howard wrote on his old Underwood:

All fled, all done
So lift me on the pyre.
The feast is over
And the lamps expire.

Vol. 2, Grim Lands

Foreword

The first time we saw the layouts and illustrations for The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Here was an illustrated book of a variety that no one had tried to produce in decades. It was magnificent. In fact, it was difficult to imagine such a book actually being published in a world that didn’t take the time for such things any longer.

Little did we realize that ten years later, that book would have become the first volume in an ongoing illustrated library collecting the works of Robert E. Howard, and that we would find ourselves illustrating the seventh and eighth volumes in that series.

Every paragraph of Howard’s vivid prose has something that fires the artistic imagination. Pirates and knights. Cowboys and barbarians. Warrior women and monsters. Is there an artist alive who can resist such things?

The stories of Robert E. Howard challenge your inner kid—illustrator and reader alike—to come out and play, and stay out past dinner time.

Introduction

The “call to adventure” . . . signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.

No writer has ever answered the call to adventure with greater alacrity than Robert E. Howard, and few have proven superior to him in issuing that call to readers. For all that his stories appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the era between the World Wars, they are always fresh, always modern, “always ready,” as David Weber observes, “to teach another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory,” because they spring from that eternal well of hero tales from which the most enduring writers have drawn. His is the art of the bard, the skald, the cyfarwydd, the seanchai, the griot, the hakawaty, the biwa hoshi. Howard, in fact, may be said to have a direct connection to the oral tradition, as he is well attested to have talked his stories out, sometimes at the top of his voice, while he was writing, and to have been a spellbinding oral yarnspinner among his friends. The tales in this book, and in its companion volume, could well have been told around a fire, the audience listening raptly to the teller, surrounded, just outside the circle of light, by Mystery, and Adventure.

The telling of stories is as old as mankind, and many theorists believe that stories do much more than simply entertain us (though of course there’s nothing wrong with that). They help us find a way to make sense of the world and our lives, to give a narrative structure of meaning to what might otherwise seem a chaotic jumble of events. (In a startlingly postmodernist metanarrative within his loosely autobiographical novel, Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, written in 1928, Howard critiqued the very book he, and through him his fictional self, was in the act of writing: “It was too vague, too disconnected, too full of unexplained and trivial incidents—too much like life in a word.”) Story helps us connect and explain the incidents of life, helps us understand who we are and where we are and how we are to behave in the world and our society.

Among the oldest and most popular types of stories are hero tales, centered around an individual who performs some notable deed, and in so doing demonstrates some type of exemplary behavior (or, alternatively, behaves in a way that brings about his comeuppance, thereby showing us how not to act). It is this type of story that most appealed to Robert E. Howard, and in this volume and its companion you will find many fine examples. They can be, and all too frequently have been, read superficially, as amusements to while away the idle hour. They work splendidly on that level, and as Joseph Campbell noted, “The storyteller fails or succeeds in proportion to the amusement he affords.” For those who enjoy a fast-paced narrative expressed in direct yet poetic language, Howard succeeds marvelously. But in the best stories, there is more than amusement. “The function of the craft of the tale,” says Campbell, “was not simply to fill the vacant hour but to fill it with symbolic fare.” And here, too, Howard succeeds wonderfully. One of the real secrets of his enduring appeal, I think, is that he worked with archetypal materials almost directly, delving deeply into the reservoir of myth and dream to bring forth undisguised images and themes, to free them from the flowery conventions of “romance” that had accreted to them over the centuries, and to present them couched in language and in a worldview that was distinctly modern.

As Don Herron observed, at the same time Dashiell Hammett and the “hard-boiled” writers of Black Mask were dragging the mystery story out of the drawing rooms of the upper classes and onto the “mean streets” of the lower, Howard was hauling fantasy from the castles and magical forests to which it had long been relegated into a grimmer, darker world that was not so far removed from the experience of postwar readers. His heroes are not always “good guys”: they may be thieves, pirates, gunmen, feudists, outcasts guilty of terrible crimes. But they are good men, who adhere to strict inner codes of morality even when doing so conflicts with their self-interest. They match Raymond Chandler’s famous description of the hard-boiled private eye: “a man . . . who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid . . . a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man . . . a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it . . . the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. . . . The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.” Says Herron, “Many critics have taken up the cause of Hammett and the Black Mask writers, arguing for the ‘moral vision’ in their work, but most . . . have missed similar themes in [Howard’s] writing.”

It is not within the scope of this introduction to examine the themes and imagery of Howard’s tales: Steven Tompkins, in this volume, and Charles Hoffman, in its companion, have done an outstanding job of indicating something of the richness to be found in Howard’s work, and there is a growing body of critical literature for those who are so inclined. Read simply for pleasure, or plumbed for the richness of its symbolic content and ideas, the work of Robert E. Howard will reward the reader on multiple levels.

As I noted in the introduction to the first volume, this is largely my personal selection of the stories and poems of Robert E. Howard that I think are his best. However, I was greatly aided by a poll I conducted among longtime Howard enthusiasts and scholars, and I have sought the advice of colleagues when I faced tough choices. To keep the books manageable, we’ve had to leave out some outstanding tales and verse, of course, and many Howard fans will undoubtedly find some of their favorites missing, as are some of my own. I do hope that, should the stories or poems in this book pique your interest, you will seek out other collections: the excellent website Howard Works (www.howardworks.com) is the best online bibliographical resource.

Many of Howard’s contemporaries in the weird fiction field agreed with H. P. Lovecraft that “the King Kull series probably forms a weird peak” to his work, remarkable considering that only three tales featuring Kull saw publication during Howard’s lifetime. Two of these (The Shadow Kingdom and Kings of the Night, the latter generally considered a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull is a guest character) were included in our first volume; the other, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, is presented here. It is a metaphysical reverie that almost amounts to a prose poem, and certainly leads one to wonder how some critics ever got the idea that Howard’s barbarian characters were all brawn and no brains.

Unpublished during Howard’s life, but among the finest of his Kull tales, was By This Axe I Rule! The story is not, strictly speaking, one of “swords and sorcery”—there is no fantasy element other than the setting itself. In this tale, the ostensible villains are the conspirators who hope to overthrow Kull, but I think the real villain is one more terrible than any other-worldly demon, nefarious sorcerer, or would-be assassins: it is the stultifying traditions and laws of an ancient society, inflexible rules that stifle and inhibit everyone, from king to servant. The lack of a fantasy element made the story unsuitable for Howard’s primary market at the time, Weird Tales, while the imaginary antediluvian setting probably hurt it with the non-fantasy magazines to which he submitted it. A few years later Howard would rework the story considerably, turning it into the first of the Conan of Cimmeria tales, The Phoenix on the Sword. While the rewritten story was quite good, I’m not the only one who finds the Kull version superior: in my informal survey it outpolled the Conan version by almost three to one.

Conan, of course, proved to be a far more popular character with the readers, from the original Weird Tales appearances to the present day. This has been something of a mixed blessing: on the one hand, millions of people have become familiar with the character through comics, movies, role-playing games and other popular media, to the point that, like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Tarzan, the character is more widely known than his creator; on the other hand, though, many of those millions know the character only through the adaptations into other media, and the popular image of the fur-clad, muscle-bound, inarticulate barbarian is far from Howard’s original conception. In The Tower of the Elephant, one of the earliest written of the series, a youthful Conan, not long out of the Cimmerian hills, finds himself derided as an outlandish heathen, but soon encounters one far more outlandish than himself. Anyone who thinks Conan is little more than a brute will find those preconceptions shattered in this tale of compassion, and of unearthly revenge.

The first of Howard’s numerous series heroes to see publication was Solomon Kane, a somber Puritan adventurer and self-appointed redresser of wrongs. Believing himself to be acting as an instrument of God’s will, Kane nevertheless, in occasional moments of self-awareness, recognizes that he is prompted as much by lust for adventure as by love of God. A rigid Puritan in his creed, he nonetheless consorts with a tribal shaman and carries a ju-ju staff given him by that worthy. Wings in the Night is one of the Kane stories set in Darkest Africa, that continent that so fired the imaginations of writers like Rider Haggard and Howard, and that largely existed only in the imagination. The “white-skinned conqueror” business at the end makes us rather uncomfortable today, but as Patrick Burger notes, “Solomon Kane is all about contradictions,” and the text itself subverts one reading with another: the Aryan fighting man, we note, is standing with his ju-ju stave in one hand; the ardent Puritan who thanks the Lord for bringing him through was earlier the gibbering madman who “cursed the gods and devils who make mankind their sport, and he cursed Man who lives blindly on and blindly offers his back to the iron-hoofed feet of his gods.” Kane is one of the most complex and fascinating characters in fantasy literature.

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” Howard wrote to Lovecraft, so when Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, wrote him that he planned to start a new magazine of Oriental tales, and “especially want[ed] historical tales—tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism,” Howard was excited enough to cut short a vacation trip with some friends and return to Cross Plains and start working to fill the order. He produced some of his very best work for that unfortunately short-lived magazine, first called Oriental Stories and then The Magic Carpet Magazine. We present two of them here, Lord of Samarcand and The Shadow of the Vulture, and we wish we could include more: in my opinion, these stories represent Howard at the very top of his game. In addition to these two, I would encourage readers to seek out The Lion of Tiberias, The Sowers of the Thunder, and Hawks of Outremer, in particular. The protagonists of these stories are flawed human beings, at times bordering on the psychopathic, and they fight for causes no more noble than they are. Howard has sometimes been taken to task for what some perceive as glorification of violence, but in these stories—and in the vast majority of his stories generally—there is no glory to be found in conflict, only dust and ashes. Of Lord of Samarcand he wrote, “There isn’t a gleam of hope in it. It’s the fiercest and most sombre thing I ever tried to write. A lot of milksops—maybe—will say it’s too savage to be realistic, but to my mind, it’s about the most realistic thing I ever attempted. But it’s the sort of thing I like to write—no plot construction, no hero or heroine, no climax in the accepted sense of the word, all the characters complete scoundrels, and every-body double-crossing everybody else.”

While much of Howard’s fiction may seem unrelentingly grim, arguably his most commercial series, during his lifetime, consisted of humorous stories. A lifelong fan of boxing, in 1929 Howard sold his first story of the battling merchant sailor, Steve Costigan, and subsequently twenty-one of these rollicking misadventures appeared in the pages of Fight Stories, Action Stories, and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine (as well as one in The Magic Carpet Magazine, with Costigan’s name changed to Dennis Dorgan, under the byline “Patrick Ervin”). “But don’t be fooled by the slapstick nature of the stories,” says Chris Gruber; “the themes of love, responsibility, sacrifice, and honor churn just beneath the surface of the rugged, burlesque humor.” And certainly Costigan and his other boxing characters stand alongside his great heroic fantasy characters in their refusal to give up, no matter how badly they may seem to be getting beaten.

In 1930, Howard began corresponding with that other great weird fictionist of the day, H. P. Lovecraft, and in short order the two were sending one another lengthy letters full of commentary, travelogue, anecdote, and argument: they debated art vs. commerce, law and order vs. individual freedom, and most famously, “civilization” vs. “barbarism.” Very early in this correspondence, Lovecraft encouraged Howard to use his own Southwestern milieu as a background for his stories, as Lovecraft had done with New England and August Derleth, another Weird Tales writer with whom Howard would strike up a correspondence, had done with his native Wisconsin. This nudge sent Howard down the path of western writing, which would increasingly occupy him for the remainder of his short life.

The Man on the Ground is a very effective little vignette that reflects Howard’s fascination with the fuedists of Texas, and with hatreds so strong that they become almost concrete, living things. Leo Grin has noted that, in Howard’s work, “Heroes, villains, animals, plants, landscapes—all seethe and writhe with a breathtaking, unrelenting, very human emotionalism,” and that “In Howard’s worldview every obstacle—whether Man or Beast or Nature—becomes not just an impediment but an enemy, something not only to be battled but to be hated.” Within the stories included in the two volumes of The Best of Robert E. Howard will be found ample evidence that Howard’s characters are often driven by hate, to the point that their foes become no longer human but mere objects of that hatred. In this tale, and in the later Red Nails, we see that the hatreds born of feuds can become something like forces of nature, against which the individuals caught up in them are as helpless as they would be against a tempest. Again, I think it is important to recognize that, in writing about hatred as a motivating force, Howard is not advocating for it; as with his seemingly unrelenting focus on violent action, he is portraying an aspect of human nature, one with which we find ourselves all too often confronted in the daily news.

In Old Garfield’s Heart, Howard takes the admonition to write about his native environs literally: “Lost Knob” is his fictional version of Cross Plains, the small Central West Texas town in which he lived. Howard’s love of Texas history and legend came not only from his reading but from talking with old pioneers, men and women who had lived through the frontier days of a region through which the last Indian raids had swept only about fifty years before this tale was written.

“The phenomenon of an outlaw looting a section under the guise of an officer of the law was not unknown in the early West—as witness Henry Plummer, and some others,” Howard wrote Lovecraft. He went on to relate at some length episodes from the beginning and end of Hendry Brown’s brief career as marshal of Caldwell, Kansas: the marshal had come to a bad end when he and some accomplices tried to rob the bank. Not long afterward, Howard told August Derleth that he had just written a thirty-thousand-word western story in which “my main character was drawn from Hendry Brown.” That story was Vultures of Wahpeton, and along with passages from his letters, it strongly hints of the promise that Howard would someday write the epic of the Southwest he hoped for. Howard was a bit ahead of his time with the western: it would not be until several years after his death that the bleak worldview and the protagonist whose hat isn’t white would come into their own in the western magazines.

Another of Howard’s commercially successful series was his tall tales of Breckinridge Elkins, a mountain man with a heart of gold and a head of lead. An Elkins story ran in every issue of Action Stories from March 1934 until they ran out in October 1936, four months after Howard’s death (a final story appeared in January 1937). When the editor of Action Stories moved over to Argosy, he asked Howard to provide a series similar to the Elkins. The young author had wanted to write for Argosy since he was a teenager, but one boxing story in 1929 had been all he had been able to manage, so he now took advantage of the opportunity and created Pike Bearfield, of Wolf Mountain, Texas. Pike may be a little slow in the thinking department, but if there’s mayhem in the offing he’s likely to be right in the thick of it. Gents on the Lynch is a riotously funny tale, and is also interesting in that we here see Howard putting a humorous spin on a plot very similar to Vultures of Wahpeton, almost as if he’d asked himself what would happen if Breck Elkins, rather than Steve Corcoran, had been recruited as a deputy in Wahpeton.

Pigeons from Hell may not be the most chilling title in the world of horror fiction, but the story it heads is among the first rank. Based on tales the young Bob Howard had heard from an old former slave, while living briefly in the piney woods of East Texas, it is a tale of terror in an old deserted house, and of a ghastly revenge. There is some period racism, but we hope it won’t mar your enjoyment of this chilling masterpiece. Lovecraft said of Howard, “Seldom if ever did he set down a lifeless stock character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality. . . .” When Howard dealt with tropes of horror fiction, stock monsters like werewolves, vampires, and the like, he always gave them some unusual twist, something that made them uniquely his. In this tale, his creation of the zuvembie gives a Howardian spin to the zombie.

Wild Water finds Howard about as close to home as it is possible to get. Like Old Garfield’s Heart, the story is set in the “Lost Knob” country, but it is based on an actual event that had taken place the year before the story was written. Some thirty miles south of Cross Plains lies the larger town of Brownwood, where Howard had attended his final year of high school and two years of commercial courses, and where he visited frequently with his good friends Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson. In 1931, work began on a dam eight miles north of Brownwood to impound water from the Pecan Bayou and Jim Ned Creek to create a reservoir. Engineers had estimated that it would take two years, at the normal rate of rainfall, to fill the reservoir. But on July 3, 1932, a torrential rain fell over the area, and the entire reservoir was filled, 7,000 acres filled to an average depth of more than twenty feet, in just six hours. It was the equivalent of suddenly diverting the flow of Niagara Falls into the watershed of the two small creeks. The story also speaks eloquently of where Howard’s sympathies resided during the Depression.

In Howard’s library were two books on Thomas Edward Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”: Lawrence’s own Revolt in the Desert and Lowell Thomas’ With Lawrence in Arabia. Howard had a fascination with adventurers who “went native”: Lawrence, Sir Richard F. Burton, “Chinese” Gordon, and many others. From these, and from the novels of Talbot Mundy, came the character Howard would claim was the first he ever conceived: Francis X. Gordon, known throughout the Orient as “El Borak,” “the Swift.”

“Some day I’m going to write stories about pirates and maybe cannibals,” ten-year-old Robert Howard told a neighbor, a promise he would make good on. Conan follows the red trade at various times in his career, and one of the tales of Solomon Kane features pirates and makes clear that Kane had formerly sailed with them. With his creation of Black Terence Vulmea, Howard created a buccaneer worthy of joining that illustrious company, and with the interplay between Vulmea and Captain Wentworth in Black Vulmea’s Vengeance, he shows how deftly he can handle a slow, subtle change in the interactions between two antagonists.

In my polling of Howard fans and scholars, the top-ranking Conan story was the last one Howard wrote, Red Nails. Writing to another great Weird Tales author, Clark Ashton Smith, Howard said, “Sent a three-part serial to Wright yesterday: ‘Red Nails,’ which I devoutly hope he’ll like. A Conan yarn, and the grimmest, bloodiest and most merciless story of the series so far. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.” Howard was fresh from a trip to Lincoln, New Mexico, site of the “Lincoln County War” and the exploits of one of his favorite outlaws, Billy the Kid. To Lovecraft he had written: “I think geography is the reason for the unusually savage and bloodthirsty manner in which the feud was fought out, a savagery that has impressed everyone who has ever made an intelligent study of the feud and the psychology behind it. The valley in which Lincoln lies is isolated from the rest of the world. Vast expanses of desert and mountains separate it from the rest of humanity—deserts too barren to support human life. The people in Lincoln lost touch with the world. Isolated as they were, their own affairs, their relationship with one another, took on an importance and significance out of proportion to their actual meaning. Thrown together too much, jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, feeding upon themselves, until they reached monstrous proportions and culminated in those bloody atrocities which startled even the tough West of that day. Visualize that narrow valley, hidden away among the barren hills, isolated from the world, where its inhabitants inescapably dwelt side by side, hating and being hated, and at last killing and being killed. In such restricted, isolated spots, human passions smolder and burn, feeding on the impulses which give them birth, until they reached a point that can hardly be conceived by dwellers in more fortunate spots. . . . I have heard of people going mad in isolated places; I believe the Lincoln County War was tinged with madness.” In Red Nails, Howard limns the very apotheosis of the feud. It is also one of his most richly symbolic, mythological tales.

“Mr. Howard’s poetry,” wrote Lovecraft, in eulogizing his friend, “—weird, warlike, and adventurous—was no less notable than his prose. It had the true spirit of the ballad and the epic, and was marked by a pulsing rhythm and potent imagery of extremely distinctive cast.” Howard was a natural poet, able to type out page after page of spontaneous, first-draft poetry of surprising quality in letters to his friend Clyde Smith, who responded in kind. While some of his verse was published in small poetry magazines, and a number of his best appeared in Weird Tales, Howard’s preferences were for traditional forms such as the ballad and the sonnet that were falling out of favor. In his poetry we find many of the themes that inform his fiction, and in his fiction we frequently find his poetic voice. Indeed, Steve Tompkins says “His poetry . . . haunted his prose, imbuing it with an intensity and imagery that wedded drive and dream.” And Steve Eng, whose magisterial “Barbarian Bard: The Poetry of Robert E. Howard” remains the best study of the subject, and among the finest essays on Howard’s work in general, observed, “Robert E Howard may have sensed that poetry suited his imagination better than did prose. His fictional Sword-and-Sorcery heroes and foes would seem to be more naturally chanted or sung about than portrayed in paragraphs.”

We hope that these two volumes of The Best of Robert E. Howard will introduce new readers to the breadth and depth of his work, and that they will even have some of his fans taking a deeper look. “What is essential in a work of art,” wrote Carl Jung, “is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as a man to the spirit and heart of mankind.” In using the ancient symbols and imagery and themes of the hero tale, Howard was able to speak from his own heart to ours, in language that is rich with meaning without being expository. “The artist is the one who communicates myth for today,” said Joseph Campbell. “But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.” Or, as Hannah Arendt put it, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

So read the stories of Robert E. Howard for enjoyment—the meaning will reveal itself when you are ready for it.

Barbarian at the Pantheon-Gates

In [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s intellectual scenario, the frontier was visualized as a terrain on which two kingdoms of force, “savagery and civilization,” stood toe to toe contending for supremacy. As long as neither held dominance there was danger, but there was also boundless freedom. Into this landscape came the archetypal American, an American who was free in a way that no American has been free since. Free to choose patterns of conduct from an infinity of choices, free to move easily back and forth across the line which separated savagery and civilization, free to take the best from the wilderness and the best that civilization had to offer, free to create his self from the materials of a totally unrestricted environment.

That knocking you hear, polite but persistent, is the people who assembled Volumes I and II of The Best of Robert E. Howard, addressing themselves to the front door of the American literary pantheon. Let’s be upfront while we’re out front: not only do we put Howard’s finest work on a pedestal, we’ve even gone so far as to pick out a place of honor for that pedestal within the pantheon’s marmoreal recesses. These books are designed to be more than just a Petition for Admittance; our aim has been a show of force, an effort to rout derisive interdiction with a decisive intervention in a debate that’s been too non-evidentiary for too long.

In a sense that debate has been underway since at least the fall of 1934, while Howard was still writing—let’s join a conversation already in progress back then between two cousins, both small-town schoolteachers in West Texas, as they discuss a writer dismissed by one as small-time. Enid Gwathmey refuses to accept “the pulp and confession magazines as legitimate starting places for writers. Good stories had stood the test of time. Examples of good writing were put into literature books.” That’s all Novalyne Price, to whose invaluable 1986 memoir One Who Walked Alone we owe the recap of this cousinly disagreement, needs in order to pounce:

“You read Edgar Allan Poe, don’t you? I heard you talking about him to your class the other day.”

She looked at me as if I had the measles. “Poe is a good writer,” she said. “I was pointing out what a wonderful choice of words he had; I was trying to get my students to enjoy using words carefully to improve their writing.”

“Bob has a wonderful choice of words, too,” I insisted, “and as far as the content of his stories and of Poe’s, they write the same kind of nightmarish stuff. The main difference is that Poe’s works are in the literature books and Bob’s aren’t . . . yet. Someday, some English teacher will be telling kids to try and write like Bob.”

“I will have to see that to believe it,” Enid said. “I will certainly have to see that to believe it.”

The Best of Robert E. Howard would enable Enid to see and believe, but handing the two volumes to her would require some time travel. More encouragingly, the readers of today and tomorrow now have the opportunity to verify the “wonderful choice of words” defended by Novalyne Price for themselves in the preceding pages. Those words do indeed deserve to be “in the literature books,” and are closer to getting there thanks to Del Rey’s Library of Robert E. Howard. And while only a few English teachers are telling their pupils to “try and write like Bob” as of yet, he is beginning to be thesis-fodder or a dissertation-magnet, a trend that the overdue-but-impending arrival of his Collected Letters and Complete Poems can only galvanize.

Novalyne’s attribution of “the same kind of nightmarish stuff” to both Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Ervin Howard is a reminder that the Texan is already a redoubtable presence in one pantheon. We can’t be certain that she took her cue from her sometime boyfriend in measuring him against Poe, but we do know that years before Howard met her, in a December 1928 letter he alluded with a sort of self-deprecating bravado to “the school to which Poe contributed and I at present honor with my presence—literarily speaking—I mean the school of fantasy and horror writing.” That he was at the top of his class within that school has been confirmed by generations of fans and a generous entry in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy, in which John Clute deems him “of central interest in the field of fantasy” and attributes his “huge appeal to later readers” to “considerable invention” and “the feel of the wind of Story.”

Heroic/epic fantasy authors and historical novelists specializing in the edged-weapon clashes of ancient or medieval warfare are often quick to tip their plumed, crested, or horned helmets to Howard. As David Weber recognized in an introduction to a 1995 collection of the Bran Mak Morn stories, “Bran and Cormac and Kull are always ready to teach yet another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory.”

Howard was more than just a fantasist, although there is no “just” about his achievements in the genre. While it would be silly to label him, or anyone, an American Tolkien, it is not at all silly to alter a few pronouns in one of leading Tolkienist Verlyn Flieger’s observations about the Englishman in order to render her insight applicable to both men: “By looking backward [their] fantasy reflected the present, the temporal dislocation of [their] escape mirrored the psychological disjunction and displacement of [their century].” Flieger goes on to emphasize that “the very act of escape acknowledges that which it flees, and nostalgia, like modernism, must have a ground from which to turn away.” In Howard’s case that ground was American, and therefore controlled by a dominant down-to-earth outlook given to shooting down flights of fancy; the national lore of settlers and strivers usually chased anything more outrageous and fact-flouting out of town.

Brian Attebery’s The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature—essential reading, provided one avoids falling into the book’s Howard-shaped hole—begins with an examination of how fantasy was endangered before the genre could even acquire a tradition in “the country where pragmatism became a philosophy and ‘normalcy’ a point of faith.” Nor should we forget the ur-faith of Puritanism, which ensures that even today places exist in the United States where a burning eagerness to read, say, the Harry Potter novels is met with an eagerness to burn the Harry Potter novels. The Enlightenment so thoroughly incorporated in the Founders’ blueprints was hardly more encouraging; how, for example, is a model home like Monticello to be haunted? The fantastic survived, in Attebery’s words, “as a resistance movement, working to undermine the national faith in things-as-they-are,” one given to “hiding out in the nursery and periodically venturing out disguised as romance or satire or science fiction.”

L. Frank Baum paved the yellow brick road for the fantasists that followed, but his Oz is arguably more of a proto-Disneyland than a fully functioning American fairyland, as disinviting to many adults, and adolescents aspiring to adulthood, as it is come-hitherish to children and those other adults who aspire to revisit childhood. Edgar Rice Burroughs afforded Howard his principal model of a dream-life gaudier and boasting the performances of more exotic megafauna than any three-ring circus, but told his most enduring stories on the far, the optimistic side of the First World War, before shell-shock and trench fever went to work on Victorian values. To us Barsoom and Amtor and Pellucidar seem to yield too quickly to empire-building and futures of cultural terraforming rather than terror swarming. Howard’s dark fantasy is more informed by history, as is his history by dark fantasy—witness the Suleyman-who-is-no-longer-quite-so-Magnificent of The Shadow of the Vulture, for whom imminent defeat appears as “a gray plain of the dead, where corpses dragged their lifeless bodies to an outworn task, animated only by the will of their master.”

But Howard’s well-situated alcove in the fantasy pantheon isn’t enough for us; by hook or by crook, or rather by battering ram or skeleton key, we’re looking to get him into another pantheon as well, the one implicit in the argument Novalyne Price had with her cousin Enid: “Poe’s works are in the literature books and Bob’s aren’t . . . yet.” To highlight what makes Howard an American classic, we must agree on what makes a classic. Although science fiction writer Gordon R. Dickson, in his introduction to the 1980 Howard collection The Road of Azrael, defined a genuine classic as the “golden bell-sound” of a unique voice, that of an author “who has something to give which did not exist in the world before he came into it, and which disappeared forever when he went out of it,” we need credentials to sway those who feign deafness to, or genuinely cannot hear, the golden bell-sound.

Howard’s own words to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith after he received the first of many missives from fellow Weird Tales contributor H. P. Lovecraft could be construed as a warning: “He’s out of my class. I’m game to go the limit with a man my weight, but me scrapping with him is like a palooka climbing into a ring with a champion.” He was wrong as can be about that—geography forced his sparring-partnership with Lovecraft (unlike, say, the bond between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) to play itself out on paper, and most semi-impartial judges have awarded a majority of the rounds to Howard—but a few too many ill-considered comparisons and we might as well present his literary standing with a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Are we shoving him into the ring against opponents to whom he would be lucky to lose? Do even his most unforgettable stories belong in the same weight class as those of Poe and Hawthorne, Twain and Bierce, Hemingway and Faulkner? Are we being delusional if we borrow what D. H. Lawrence said of Herman Melville—“He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away, out!”—and apply it to Howard? Well, as Sailor Steve Costigan says of himself and Mike, his throat-seeking missile of a bulldog, in this volume’s The Bulldog Breed, “Always outclassed in everything except guts and grip!”

The American literary pantheon is not on any map (“True places never are,” Melville reminds us in Moby Dick) but just as baseball boasts Cooperstown and rock-and-roll its Hall of Fame in Cleveland, The Library of America is an approximation, a simulacrum, the earthly tabernacle or reliquary for “America’s best and most significant writing.” Like America itself, an American pantheon should be a work in progress, a movable—and expandable—feast. Room is being found for those who never asked to be Americans, or did indeed ask but were rejected, and if the Library of America’s seal of approval can be read as the functional equivalent of a pantheon induction, the hospitable welcomes recently extended to H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick should be cause for Howardist rejoicing. The Library’s blurbage for Lovecraft salutes his “classic stories of the strange and fantastic from the visionary master of cosmic horror” and “intensely personal vision.” The vision of his Texas correspondent was equally intense and personal; the word “impersonal” might as well be Etruscan in terms of its usefulness when examining Howard’s work.

Far from being teacher’s pets, idealizations with ichor or ink in their veins instead of blood, the residents of the American pantheon fascinate as human beings, deeply flawed but even more deeply talented. Our inductee-in-waiting will fit right in; he is always going to be a controversial figure, one with not only his fair share of faults, but also an unfair share of alleged faults. Lovecraft somehow neglected to accuse him of complicity in the Lindbergh kidnapping, but sent so many other reproaches his way that Howard allowed himself a little fun in a July 1935 letter:

Recalling off-hand the charges you have made against me, I remember that at various times you have accused me of being: Exalter-of-the-Physical-Above-the-Mental; Enemy of Humanity; Foe of Mankind; Apostle of Prejudice; Distorter of Fact; Repudiater of Evolutionary Standards; Over-Emphasizer of Ethics; Sympathizer of Criminals (that one broke all altitude records); Egotist; Poseur; Emotionalist; Defender of Ignorance; Sentimentalist; Romanticist. If I were guilty of all the things of which you’ve accused me, I not only wouldn’t be fit to live; I wouldn’t have sense enough to live.

To which list of charges some pantheon-gatekeepers would hasten to add, Pulp Hack, Racist, Sexist, Suicide, Bully, Arrested Adolescent, and Creator of Conan. Yes, Conan, the Cimmerian, he of the gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, he who poses a gigantic problem in that his huge, but decidedly non-Schwarzeneggerian, shadow falls across the rest of Howard’s work. Stick up for Howard to her cousin Enid though she did, Novalyne Price herself seems to have regarded Conan as a deal-breakingly undesirable potential brother-in-law, a dependably bad influence on the writer she was dating. And down through the decades since then, the Cimmerian has gone the way of Tarzan and James Bond as a creation whose links to his creator have been repeatedly severed, so that in John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity we catch the otherwise staggeringly erudite Garry Wills referring to “Conan the Barbarian, created by John Milius.”

“Conan the Barbarian,” as dumbed-down as he is pumped-up, is merely a multimedia reduction of Conan the Cimmerian, the character displayed to optimum effect in this volume’s The Tower of the Elephant and Red Nails, and in The People of the Black Circle and Beyond the Black River of its predecessor. The title of the present afterword, which positions Howard as a barbarian at the pantheon-gates, is intended as more than a rote invocation of his uncivilized-and-proud-of-it characters. For much of America’s cultural history, any homegrown writer who presented himself at the gates guarded by Europeans—and those Americans who, in the words of Ernest Hemingway, “wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making”—was ipso facto a barbarian, an outlander.

When we run a banner with the strange device “Barbarian” up the flagpole in an American context to see if anyone salutes, we get some historically and culturally freighted responses. Before Howard happened to “barbarism” and “barbarian,” European-Americans usually associated those words with the continent’s previous owners. Europeans for their part have reached for the adjective “barbaric” and the noun “barbarian” so often when considering Americans of any sort that it would be forgivable to conclude that the New World was named in honor of the navigator Barbario Vespucci. And Americans have been almost as quick to call each other barbarians; for New Yorker George Templeton Strong, that always-quotable diarist/onlooker of the antebellum and Civil War years, all Southerners bore the mark of Cain as soon as congressman Charles Sumner bore the marks of the hotheaded Preston Brooks’ cane, and were besides “a race of lazy, ignorant, coarse, sensual, swaggering, sordid beggarly barbarians.”

The childhood adage is only half right: sticks and stones may break our bones, but names can hurt hellaciously as well. However, names are also like sticks and stones in that they can be picked up and thrown back in the face of tormentors. In recent decades epithets meant to identify and isolate the members of certain groups have been worn by those members as badges of affirmation, and before that a few Americans comfortable in their own figurative buckskins taught themselves to take pride in, rather than umbrage at, “barbarian” and its variants. Walt Whitman’s I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world in Song of Myself is only the most famous instance.

American barbarians force their way in where they are least expected. Henry James was a writer so unlike Howard it is a wonder the English language was big enough for the two of them; and yet in his 1877 novel The American, protagonist Christopher Newman visits the Louvre, where he is perceived as “the great western barbarian stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete old world, and then swooping down on it.” John Dos Passos’ explanation for his return to America after the Great War was that “for us barbarians, men from an unfinished ritual,” postwar Europe was once again overly “gentle.” And barbaric resolve of a sort that Howard might have found admirable is implicit in this Henry Miller exhortation in Tropic of Cancer: “It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us; but if that is so let us set up a last, agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop!” In his Seven Keys to Texas the historian T. R. Fehrenbach even frames the “eternal dilemma” of the Lone Star State writer in nigh-Howardian terms: “To go or not to go to Rome, and when in Rome, to try to become Roman, or make his living explaining his barbarian ways to Romans—who may find them greatly entertaining.”[1]

Howard was aware that his barbarians might be mistaken for Noble Savages. Writing to Lovecraft in late October 1932, he denied possessing an “idyllic view of barbarism,” and expressed impatience “with the depiction of the barbarian of any race as a stately, god-like child of Nature, endowed with strange wisdom and speaking in measured and sonorous phrases.” He freely admitted that the barbarian of history was subject to tabus like “sharp sword-edges, between which he walked shuddering,” and more often than not brutal, squalid, childish, treacherous, and unstable. And yet “The day and night were his book, wherein he read of all things that run or walk or crawl or fly. Trees and grass and moss-covered rocks and birds and beasts and clouds were alive to him, and partook of his kinship. The wind blew his hair and he looked with naked eyes into the sun. Often he starved, but when he feasted, it was with a mighty gusto.” The Howard barbarian might leave Eden, an Eden more unforgiving in different ways than the Genesis-garden, but he does so of his own accord, and when he ventures city-ward he functions as an x-factor, a reality principle, handwriting on the wall scrawled forebodingly before ever the wall was built.

We might transfer to Conan what Paul Horgan said of the mountain man in his Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History: “He was an American original, as hard as the hardest thing that could happen to him,” but after that—and this is crucial—much would still need to be said. From the criminality of the City of Thieves’ Maul, The Tower of the Elephant scales the sheer, silvery cliff-face of cruelty, of a highly civilized barbarity exposure to which will move Conan, the nominal barbarian, to shoulder the guilt of the entire human race. The not-from-around-here thief or assassin, the off-limits temple or tower, the monstrous or demonic hench-being of a blackly renowned necromancer awaiting the intruder—these are the basic building blocks of a fantasy subgenre with which presumed familiarity easily breeds contempt. Yet Howard, decades before sword-and-sorcery was even dubbed sword-and-sorcery, used the blocks to construct something startlingly non-formulaic, so much so that when Tom Shippey, as perceptive an academic as has ever engaged with modern fantasy, picked Tower for his 1994 Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, he remarked on the “unexpected” compassion of “Howard’s normally brutish hero.”[2]

And so we open the pages of one of the pivotal American heroic fantasy tales and find an outlander pitying a being who is infinitely more of an outsider, while the monster-killing imperative yields to the decision to assist the monster in its revenge-killing. We are told in The Tower of the Elephant that Conan recalls Yara to wakefulness “like a judge pronouncing doom,” and the barbarian as the feral Rhadamanthus by way of whom his creator pronounces the dooms of civilization’s sophistries and shibboleths, the certainty that those who live off the fat of the land will die from that same luxury in the blink of history’s eye—these concepts are epitomized and versified in that crucial Howard poem, A Song of the Naked Lands.

The Howardisms of this parable-as-paradigm—“Grim was the barter, red the trade,” or “the prison of satin and gold” known as “Culture and Art”—should not distract us from realizing that the Texan was not the first to shoe and saddle this particular hobbyhorse. The cheerless tune of Song is audible in Henry David Thoreau’s observation “It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf, that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were,” and dates all the way back to Herodotus. The much-traveled Greek chose to end his Histories with a moral courtesy of Cyrus the Great. As translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and A. R. Burns, the hero-king is urged to help himself to a “better” country. He does not burst into song, but he does anticipate A Song of the Naked Lands:

“Soft countries breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.”

The Persians had to admit that this was true and Cyrus was wiser than they; so they left him, and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others.[3]

The point to this quick look at the backstories of terms like “barbarian” or “naked lands” is that Howard dealt himself into debates that were old before 1492 and did not embarrass himself—one of the reasons why he would not embarrass the pantheon either.

But can that august-if-virtual institution be persuaded to take in a lowly pulpster? The Library of America allowed in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who made Black Mask a legend, years ago, but then allowances are easily made for the brass knucks and coshes of hardboiled detective fiction, thanks to that subgenre’s bruisingly unsparing reportorial function. Hammett and Chandler were also fortunate enough to have John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Howard Hawks adeptly adapting their work for another, even more popular medium. With Lovecraft’s tentacles now snaking across the Library’s threshold, perhaps the pulpily fantastic will win itself more space.

When he gave the title Pulp Fiction to one of the defining movies of the Nineties, Quentin Tarantino may or may not have intended to acknowledge the fact that the best pulps have aged well because they showcased work that turned out to be ageless, but Michael Chabon’s sincerity in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, where he calls the pulps “argosies of blood and wonder,” is incontrovertible. A democracy’s pantheon should be hospitable to those who achieve excellence in intrinsically democratic venues. Stephen King, who came along too late for the pulps, started out by selling to even less prestigious markets like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank, and now seems poised for induction in the aftermath of his 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (an event that reduced Defender of the Canon Harold Bloom to weeping tears of blood).

Paul Seydor’s “reconsideration” of Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns is deservedly admired for seeing those movies as if for the first time and with the clearest of eyes. While trying to find a niche in the pantheon for his artist, Seydor singles out American literature’s “fascination—bordering, some might argue, on the pathological—with the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, and the wild. This fascination in turn results in a fiction that rarely moves far from escapist genres. The reasons our artists give for this almost always reduce to the same one when we cut through the rhetoric of individualism and freedom: the insufficiency of mainstream American life to vitalize the imagination.” Sure enough, Howard’s imagination was vitalized by the exotic, the foreign, the criminal, the wild. With transatlantic voyages not yet an option, the only New World available to Donald MacDeesa in Lord of Samarcand, who hails from the uttermost West of his day, is the East; he is limited to crossing seas of sand and oceans of grass. Yet how well Leslie Fiedler’s summation of classic American tales in general, and Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym in particular—“And through it all the outcast wanderer, equally in love with death and distance, seeks some absolute elsewhere”—suits the wayward clansman as he looks back down “the bitter trail of his life” and hugs an isolation colder than the bones of the moon. If Seydor is correct, if the truest American writing is fringe writing, all edge and no center, then by working the genre fringe Robert E. Howard teleported himself smack-dab into the center, the dream-center, of our culture. When everything is margin, marginalization becomes moot.

The title of one of the poems in this volume, Which Will Scarcely Be Understood, would do as well for a summary of Howard’s critical reception, such as it was, until the late Seventies at the earliest. And yet much of the cryptography needed to decode his meaningfulness had already been done. “During my last year in college, I’d read several of D. H. Lawrence’s books,” Novalyne Price tells us in One Who Walked Alone. “I could see they were sexy. I didn’t know whether to tell Bob about reading them or not.” Had she dipped into Lawrence’s nonfiction as well as his fiction, specifically 1923’s Studies in Classic American Literature, she would have bristled with a whole arsenal of talking points when making the case for Howard’s pantheon-readiness to cousin Enid.

Lawrence’s survey is as eccentrically electric, or electrically eccentric, as any of the newly identified classics he was covering, and no better description of what he was up to exists than cultural historian Ann Douglas’ in her Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, which despite its title is about much, much more than Manhattan or the 1920s:

The “essential American soul,” [Lawrence] proclaimed, is “hard, isolate, stoic,” and a “killer.” America is full of “vampires,” the “terrible . . . ghosts” of the black and red men the white settlers had exterminated, exploited, and, unbeknownst to themselves, envied and assimilated. For Lawrence, America was a King Kong figure—King Kong’s cinematic debut was only a decade away—careening amid the wasteland of the West, and he was King Kong’s prophet.[4]

Douglas goes on to stress that “Lawrence called the American literature he was writing about ‘classic’—recognized and revered, in other words, by those acknowledged to be best able to judge the matter—but next to no one knew it. Using the term was, in fact, a publicity stunt, Lawrence’s bold bid to canonize a group of authors who were largely ignored, forgotten, or misread.” Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville were for him avatars of a shadow-side America, the “inner nature of brutality [of which was] more extreme and more at odds with its public mask and voice than was the case anywhere else.” When the mask slipped, when Kong broke his chains, as per Douglas paraphrasing Lawrence, “America might be the only nation capable, if uncensored and unchecked, of flooding the civilized world with what William Carlos Williams called in his self-consciously Lawrentian study In the American Grain (1925), ‘rich regenerative violence.’ ”

And flood the civilized world it did, with red harvests and blood meridians, wild bunches and magnum forces. Imagery that conjures a civilized world flooded, by forces at last unchecked, with rich regenerative violence is of course also ground zero for Howard studies. Lawrence’s “bold bid to canonize” leads straight to Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence trilogy about the mythology of the American frontier, and to Howard’s most powerful work. Those of us who’ve worked on The Best of Robert E. Howard are driven by a “self-consciously Lawrentian agenda” of our own—we too are partisans of a writer “largely ignored, forgotten, or misread,” and we’re sure that because his finest stories are classic, “though next to no one [knows] it,” they should be promoted as such in a repeat of Lawrence’s 1923 “publicity stunt.”

The slightest suggestion of Howard’s induction-potential will have some of the unconverted demanding the installation of a metal detector in the pantheon’s entrance. Is the violence that convulses Howard’s stories rich and regenerative, or just rote? “This young man has the power to feel. He knows nothing of war, yet he is drenched with blood,” Ambrose Bierce conceded of Stephen Crane. Similarly drenched if similarly unbaptized by fire, Howard too possessed a power to feel that his readers never cease to feel. Jack London was the authorial father-figure who taught the Texan the most about luring romanticism into the dark alleys where realism was waiting. George Orwell thought London “essentially a short-story writer,” conspicuous for “his love of brutality and physical violence and, in general, what is known as ‘adventure.’ ” Alfred Kazin for his part noted in his 1942 overview of modern American literature On Native Ground, “Nothing is so important about London as the fact that he came on the scene at a time when the shocked consciousness of a new epoch demanded the kind of heady violence that he was always so quick to provide.” Howard, who came of age in an even newer epoch, trafficked in even more unsparing violence; early in Lord of Samarcand a battlefield’s “shrieks of dire agony still [rise] to the shivering stars which [peer] palely out, as if frightened by man’s slaughter of man.”

Yes, his work is full of swords, but they are often double-edged, and a preoccupation with the survival of the fittest is shadowed by the certainty that both fitness and survival are fleeting. At his best, Howard was a purveyor not of cheap thrills but of frissons costly for both the writer and his more alert readers. “One problem in writing bloody literature,” he mused to HPL in 1932, “is to present it in such a manner as to avoid a suggestion of cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama—which is what some people will always call action, regardless of how realistic and true it is.” In an April 1932 letter Howard vented, “I’ll swear, I’ve written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.” He never did (and perhaps would not have been able to had he tried), but in Lord of Samarcand Donald MacDeesa topples both Bayazid the Thunderer and Timour the Lame—the pistol shot with which he redresses his grievance with the latter is anachronistic, but also precociously American.

Dirge-dire, Lord is enough of a revenge tragedy to frighten a Jacobean. If Howard the poet likens the nations Timour tramples underfoot to “lost women crying in the mountains at night,” Howard the dramaturge takes over when MacDeesa assures Bayazid, “I would go through greater hells to bring you to the dust!” The Texan blithely challenges both Christopher Marlowe and Edgar Allan Poe; indeed, by helping himself to several chapter epigraphs, Howard induces Poe to attend his somber feast even as Bayazid is forced to be present at Timour’s. This volume’s Son of the White Wolf, wherein the titular predator is a rough beast whose hour comes round again in one of the Great War’s only “glamorous” sideshows, also aspires to be “bloody literature.” Bloody, and prescient—cultures force-marching themselves into imagined pasts in pursuit of illusory purity and predestination are a regrettably familiar phenomenon to us in the twenty-first century.

Black Vulmea’s Vengeance demonstrates that Howard was potentially a pirate novelist capable of boarding the flagships of Stevenson and Sabatini, but also transcends “cheap blood-and-thunder melodrama” in its exploration of mercy as a form of revenge more devastating to its undeserving recipient than even the most massively retaliatory payback would be. Living with one’s own crimes can be more painful and more protracted than dying because of them. Elsewhere we find a vignette swollen into a metaphor in The Man on the Ground, as a feud-driven Texan’s hatred, “an almost tangible abstraction—a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or necessity of material substance,” outlives him among dry-gulching-facilitating rocks “hotter than the hearthstones of hell.” D. H. Lawrence speaks in his chapter on The Scarlet Letter of “a black and complementary hatred, akin to love,” and Howard was no stranger to that perverse intimacy situated in the far regions of antipathy. Witness not only The Man on the Ground but also the final story in this volume, Red Nails, as remarkable an American treatment of the feudist cul-de-sac as there’s been since Huck Finn, caught up in the quarrel between the Shepherdson and Grangerford clans, was told “by-and-by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time.”

The story’s inspiration has little to do with the Hyborian Age and much to do with the Lincoln County War in which Billy the Kid shot to fame as a shootist. As Patrice Louinet explains in Hyborian Genesis Part III (see The Conquering Sword of Conan), a vacation that took Howard to the hyperbolically haunted site of Lincoln, New Mexico, left him speculating as to whether “the nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud—narrow, concentrated, horrible.” What was for him local, or at least regional, color also appears in the story’s “cactus-dotted plain” and reference to “cliff-dwellings of the mysterious brown people”—we are not far from Brian Attebery’s description of Burroughs’ Barsoom, “a dream or fantasy vision of the American Southwest.” As Rusty Burke comments in his in-depth study Journey Inside: The Quest of the Hero in Red Nails, much of the story’s nomenclature—Olmec, Chicmec, Tezcoti, Xuchotl—“rings with the history of the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and Central America, from whom Howard drew for the story’s proper names.” Pre-Columbian shadings may also have contributed to what the Texan teased to Clark Ashton Smith as being “the grimmest, bloodiest, and most merciless story of the series so far,” the elements of the Mesoamerican worldview that T. R. Fehrenbach, in his Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, summarized as “magic and mystery, blood and horror,” all perceived through “a filter of darkest night, or in a violent blast of sun blaze.”

Another New World underpinning is disclosed when we learn that the “sinister crimson” city was founded on the enslavement and slaughter of black people. (Xuchotl does not seem to be haunted by these original victims, but maybe, just maybe, everything that befalls all subsequent citizens, whether Kosalan or Tlazitlan, can be traced to the founding atrocity.) Conan and Valeria, the two adventurers who tip the balance of the feud, are once and future Aquilonians respectively, and therefore, given the special significance of Aquilonia (which in the Conan series “reigns supreme in the dreaming West”), Americans of a sort. The Cimmerian grins “hardily” when he accepts an offer from the Tecuhltli—“We’re both penniless vagabonds. I’d as soon kill Xotalancas as anybody”—thereby expressing an unmistakably American attitude: the history behind other people’s feuds is of little importance, and space, the essential New World resource, heals the wounds that time turns gangrenous.

But a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft in which Howard professes himself indifferent to European “squabbles and massacres,” describing the continent as “nothing but a rat-den where teeming, crowded rodents, jammed together in an unendurable mass, squeal and gnash and murder each other,” cautions us against too quickly single-sourcing the story. Europe had been a Xuchotl in 1916—note that the city has its own no-man’s-land, the Halls of Silence which lie between the feuding factions—and by 1935 looked to be one again, as the postwar years in which Howard grew up gave way to prewar years during which he and others grew aware that dictatorships were calling the tune to which democracies desperately danced. Neither entirely an Old World story nor entirely a New World story, Red Nails becomes an underworld story, a visit to a realm sealed off and trapped by the cave-in of Tlazitlan sanity. Murmurous with the ghosts of old murders, Xuchotl rises architecturally above several ossuaries’ worth of skeletons at its foundation but morally descends into “the black corridors and realms of the subterranean world.” D. H. Lawrence called Poe “an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul,” and from those same passages in Red Nails the Crawler, the Burning Skull, and the pipes of madness emerge, while Tolkemec, Howard’s diabolus ex machina, returns from the vaults of the dead as memorably as anyone has since Madeline Usher. Xuchotl surpasses even the Blassenville Manor of Pigeons from Hell as a contender to be Howard’s equivalent of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, or Poe’s palace of Prince Prospero—“And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel” covers the people of Xuchotl as well as the masquers of the Red Death.

In the stories just mentioned our pantheon prospect asked rather than evaded questions about the vengeance-imperative that powers so much genre fiction; and although he could be as pulpy as the occasion warranted—“How long can you avoid the fangs of the Poison People?” an especially odious high priest taunts a cobra-beset dancer in one of the Conan stories—the truth is that we’re dealing with an overachiever, a better writer than he needed to be to succeed in the markets available to him. Lovecraft beat everyone else to this realization while grieving for his friend in print: “He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt—for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.” The imagery here, “internal force and sincerity” breaking the surface and imprinting themselves, is precisely what D. H. Lawrence sought and found in his chosen American classics. And to Lovecraft’s tribute we can append the follow-up assertion that Howard was also greater than the profit-making policies adopted by too many of those who presumed to package his work in the decades after his death.

A natural, he possessed the unnatural degree of dedication and perseverance that getting the most out of being a natural entails. In her memoir How It Was, Mary Hemingway quoted her husband Ernest as having said, “The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do”—in some ways it was a little easier for Howard, much more of a born poet if much less of a prose revolutionary than Hemingway, with a bardic knack for investing subjectivity and selectivity through the sheer rightness of word-choices with much of the irrefutability of objectivity. His style is rather like the second of the two gifts the Nemedian girl Zenobia gives the dungeon-immured Conan in The Hour of the Dragon (the first being his freedom): “It was no slender stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only for dainty murder in milady’s boudoir; it was a forthright poniard, a warrior’s weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a diamond-sharp point.” The forthright and undainty pointedness of Howard’s best prose is equally diamond-sharp. A character resents “the slow fading of the light as a miser begrudges the waning of his gold.” “All the sanity” goes out of another’s face “like a flame blown out by the wind.” The lightning-bolts of an epic storm are “veiled in the falling flood like fire shining through frosted glass, turning the world to frosty silver.”

The active voice usurps the passive like one of Howard’s pushful swordsmen ousting an enfeebled dynasty, and the pathetic fallacy could not work harder for him were it his indentured servant, as in one of this volume’s nerve-shredding crescendos, Wings in the Night: “A shuddering white-faced dawn crept back over the black hills to shiver above the red shambles that had been the village of Bogonda.” To describe the vitality that crackles through his paragraphs we can enlist the aid of the reborn, regenerated-through-violence Esau Cairn in Almuric, Howard’s unfinished roughing-up of the Burroughsian planetary romance: “I tingled and burned and stung with life to the finger tips and the ends of my toes. Every sinew, vein, and springy bone was vibrant with the dynamic flood of singing, pulsing, humming life.” Looking again to Ann Douglas’ Terrible Honesty, we read that “Vitality, not verisimilitude, is the criterion of classic American literature; it offers a portrait of energy itself, of the adrenaline of the psyche, a portrait in which the external landscape is never separate from the landscape within.” Howard specializes in portraits of energy itself and constantly injects his work with the adrenaline of his psyche—many of his opening paragraphs are not so much invitations to continue reading as forcible abductions. American exceptionalism is perhaps better suited to literature than geopolitics, and Howard’s immediacy and intensification combine for an exceptionalism like a Texas-accented emanation of Archibald MacLeish’s “continent where the heat was hotter and the cold was colder and the sun was brighter and the nights were blacker and the distances were farther and the faces were nearer and the rain was more like rain and the mornings were more like mornings than anywhere else on earth—sooner or sweeter and lovelier over unused hills.”

He is rarely given to stately symmetry, and if some of his work (though not supremely accomplished tales like Worms of the Earth or Lord of Samarcand) can be jagged, jittery, and joltingly uneven, we need only remember that the most influential writing about the American classics often considers not whether the glass is half empty or half full, but why it tends to be half cracked. Richard Chase in his The American Novel and Its Tradition stresses the “radical disunities and contradictions” and attraction to “extreme ranges of experience” of the best American novels, while the eminent critic George Steiner once observed that “the uncertainties of taste in Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and the obscuring idiosyncrasies of their manner point directly to the dilemmas of individual talent producing in relative isolation.” We don’t think the idiosyncrasies of Howard’s manner are obscuring, except perhaps to certain bouncers on the pantheon payroll, but as a later but arguably even more isolated individual talent, he too was making much of it up as he went along, which brings us to his claim that he “was the first to light a torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be. I am, in my way, a pioneer.”

In his essay Southwestern Literature?, Larry McMurtry comments, “The tendency to practice symbolic frontiersmanship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan,” and that tendency is almost impossible to avoid when discussing the twentieth-century Texan who concerns us here. Howard’s self-identification as a torch-lighting trailblazer is not only symbolic frontiersmanship but a striking example of a well-known Leslie Fiedler generalization: “[The American writer] is forever beginning, saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest.”[5]

In Terrible Honesty Ann Douglas sketches the “culturally impoverished” Ernest Hemingway, “starting in some sense from scratch, less freighted with cultural baggage,” and therefore freed up to “fashion, with little resistance or waste, the new literary tools the modern experience demanded.” The culturally impoverished and isolated Howard labored long in a short life to fashion the new literary tools his startlingly modern varieties of heroic fantasy and historical adventure demanded.

Being a literary fire-bringer and torchbearer in West Texas was the only way in which progress still permitted Howard to be a pioneer. “He should have lived his life a generation before, when men threw a wide loop and rode long trails,” he writes of his doomed hero in Wild Water, one of the stories we’re most excited about including in this collection, and although Howard himself could continue throwing wide loops and riding long trails at his typewriter, that wasn’t enough for him. “What I want is impossible, as I’ve told you before,” he emphasized in a 1933 letter to Lovecraft, “I want, in a word, the frontier—which is compassed in the phrase, new land, open land, free land—land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.” The Howard heroes Francis Xavier Gordon and Esau Cairn, both born “in the Southwest, of old frontier stock,” light out for improbable territories where they need not try to pry open Frederick Jackson Turner’s closed frontier. Gordon, represented in The Best of Robert E. Howard by Hawk of the Hills and Son of the White Wolf, hurls himself into “howling adventures among the Indians,” only now the wild warriors are those of Afghanistan and Arabia. Cairn is hurled through space by one Professor Hildebrand’s teleportation device to a paradoxical interstellar homecoming:

I had neither companionship, books, clothing, nor any of the things which go to make up civilization. According to the cultural viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I revelled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without realistic meaning.

Someone living that vicariously through Cairn’s frontier-fresh start is unlikely to be either urbane or urban, although The Tower of the Elephant begins at the bottom, in a (mean)-street-level beggars’ banquet where only “watchmen, well paid with stained coins,” represent law and order. The setting of Vultures of Wahpeton is a cluster of mining camps with pretensions to townhood, not a city, but in its gold rush throes, Wahpeton effectively caricatures the unrestrained capitalism Franklin Delano Roosevelt was saving from itself while Howard worked on his novella: a welter of getting and spending, gouging and fleecing, wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms and gunsmoke-filled dives. More typically dreamlike are Samarcand—when Donald MacDeesa looks upon that Central Asian capital for the first time, it “[shimmers] to his gaze, mingling with the blue of the distance,” like “a city of illusion and enchantment”—and the fireworks-bedecked Constantinople of The Shadow of the Vulture, a “realm of shimmering magic, with the minarets of its mosques like towers of fire in an ocean of golden foam.” The most mysterious of all cities for Howard is obviously domesticity, and although drawn to the Middle Ages, he had difficulty imagining middle age for himself or his characters. Still, if Conan in a standoff with Valeria and Gottfried von Kalmbach flummoxed by Red Sonya are mere skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, they are skirmishes fought zestfully by both combatants. And the “pastoral quietude” of a chance meeting between a disenchanted king and a distraught slave girl in By This Axe I Rule! should serve as a warning against underestimating this writer’s range.

What’s more, different kinds of range exist; Howard certainly ranged across recorded history and the invitingly blank pages of unrecorded history. In The Star Rover Jack London imagines a “rider full-panoplied and astride of time,” and his Texan admirer, for whom that novel was something of a sacred text, clung convincingly to bucking temporal broncos in his historical fiction, especially a set of stories from the early Thirties that pit Crusaders against Eastern conquerors. Here the contending supernatural forces are not Jehovah and Allah but Hubris and Nemesis. The Shadow of the Vulture features “the Armageddon of races, Asia against Europe,” but equally stupendous and far more exotic is the death-grapple between Asia and Asia when Bayazid and Timour meet in Lord of Samarcand, as “the thunder of cymbals and kettle-drums” contends with the “awesome trumpeting” of war-elephants, and “blasts of arrows and sheets of fire” wither “men in their mail like burnt grain.”

To range we should also add reach, and a refusal to be intimidated by historical distances and distinctions. The English specialist in American literature Tony Tanner was struck by the brashness with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound availed themselves of “fragments of the world’s past and disparate cultures to build their own private worlds. This sort of relatively unfettered eclecticism when dealing with the past is peculiarly American and an utterly different thing from the European writer’s sense of the past. If anything it negates the historical sense. . . . The results and new juxtapositions can be brilliant, breathtakingly original and very un-European.” The Hyborian Age of the Conan stories also looms in Carl Van Doren’s comparison of James Branch Cabell’s fantasies to The Faerie Queen: “Geographical and chronological boundaries melt and flow, wherein fable encroaches upon history, and the creative mood of the poet re-cuts his shining fabrics as if they were whole cloth intended solely for his purposes.” And when Tanner says of Herman Melville’s prose that with “its vast assimilations, its seemingly opportunistic eclecticism, its pragmatic and improvisatory nonchalance, its capacious grandiloquence and demotic humour, it is indeed a style for America—the style of America,” he also captures many of the stylistic attributes of an American named Robert E. Howard. Opportunistic eclecticism and improvisatory nonchalance can’t help but improve a talented writer’s range.

Also pertinent to this issue is the fact that Howard spent much of his time at the typewriter trying to make editors and readers laugh. Sailor Steve Costigan, the “ordinary ham-an’-egger” who broke big for his creator in the pugilistically inclined pulp Fight Stories, is represented here by The Bull Dog Breed. Steve comes equipped with a concussion-proof skull and a repercussion-proof gullibility, and the stories about him focus on the ties that bind man and “Dublin gentleman” bulldog, and the inability of two-fistedness to keep up with two-facedness. A few years later Breckinridge Elkins, the first and most illustrious of Howard’s mountain man man-mountains, arrived as discreetly and understatedly as a rockslide, and he was soon joined by Pike Bearfield. Pragmatically cloned for a new market, Bearfield acquires his own, epistolary-narrative-shaking identity in this volume’s Gents on the Lynch, and also The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from the Pecos.

The farther west the English language got, the greater its Americanization, as Paul Horgan recognizes: “Its inflations and exaggerations were brandished in reply to the vastness of the West, the bulk of mountains, where man was so little. If there was vulgarity in its expression, there was also pathos, for what showed plain was the violent dancing of a spirit that must assert or be lost.” Only a generation or two removed from all of this, Howard knew what he wanted to recapture for Pike Bearfield and Breck Elkins; to Lovecraft in 1931 he admitted, “Western folkways and traditions are so impregnated with savagery, suffering and strife, that even Western humor is largely grim, and, to non-Westerners, often grotesque.” The savagery, suffering, and strife of Vultures of Wahpeton-esque elements like Mustang Stirling’s outlaws and a Vigilante Committee are reprised farcically in Gents, as Bearfield’s spirit dances violently in passages like “Folks is always wanting to lynch me, and quite a few has tried, as numerous tombstones on the boundless prairies testifies.” Gents also features Howard, who seethed over attempts by Easterners to impose their frames of reference on the Southwest, gleefully imposing a Southwesterner’s frame of reference on the most hallowed events of East Coast history: “He said the Britishers was going to sneak out of a town named Boston which I jedge must have been a right sizable cowtown or mining-camp or something, and was going to fall on the people unawares and confiscate their stills and weppins and steers and things.”

The man responsible for a story called By This Axe I Rule! is likely to disdain check-swings of that axe; not for Howard the hedging of bets and eying of exits found in earlier American fantastic fiction. He did not so much write his stories down or type them out as commit them—and commit to them. For Ann Douglas, Melville’s books “move forward when he is in close connection with himself, in the grip of his daemon.” That is also true of Howard, to the point where he abandoned several fan-favorite characters because the close connection had been lost; his daemon had shifted his grip. But the grip is searingly, serratedly tight in, for example, Wings of the Night; Melville’s Ahab, a Quaker, describes himself as “madness maddened” during his pursuit of the white whale, and the akaanas of Wings airlift Kane, the Puritan, to a similarly far gone state. Howard dwells upon their “fearful mirth to see men die wholesale,” their “strange and grisly sense of humor [that is] tickled by the suffering of a howling human.” We could be dealing with the “boys” of King Lear’s “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” although in this instance it is not the flies but the boys who are winged. While the akaanas are not divine or even supernatural, Howard does liken them to “demons flying back to hell through the dawn,” and they call to mind Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence comment on the forests of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The man who enters the wilderness hunting for something he regards as truth or power is always led to a place where devils dance in a ring, inviting him to a black Eucharist.”

Having agreed with Lovecraft “that Puritanism provides a rich field for psychological study,” in an October 1930 letter, Howard exploits that rich field in Wings as nowhere else in his Solomon Kane series. America’s Puritan and African antecedents encounter each other in a “pre-American” setting: “the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world.” And yet the supposedly Dark Continent illuminates Solomon Kane as he seeks out the shadows, becomes most fully himself, acquires a context that his birthplace Devon, as is evidenced by the hail-and-farewell of Solomon Kane’s Homecoming, can never hope to provide. In his 2004 essay Heritage of Steel: Howard and the Frontier Myth, Steven R. Trout memorably discusses the one-sided dialogue between Kane and the “shriveled, mummified head of Goru, whose eyes, strangely enough, did not change in the blaze of the sun or the haunt of the moon.” Goru is an eloquent if wordless accuser; the Englishman has failed in what might otherwise seem an objectionably paternalistic role—proved better at being a Kane than being a Solomon. He is a king whose kingdom is raptored away from him, and the akaanas, it should be noted, arrive from Europe to prey upon and despoil—in effect, colonize—Africans.

As Brian Attebery emphasizes, “The American writer must find some way of reentering the ancient storytelling guild: he must validate his claim to the archetypes that are the tools of the trade.” Howard’s modus operandi involved straightforward breaking and entering, after which he helped himself to whatever archetypes he needed. Thus the harpies of Wings, on loan from Jason and the Argonauts, and the advisory to readers at the start of The Valley of the Worm acknowledging that they “have heard the tale before in many guises wherein the hero was named Tyr, or Perseus, or Siegfried, or Beowulf, or Saint George”—and yet it is Niord/James Allison/Robert E. Howard who knows best, by dint of having known first. Such effrontery is a way for the American fantasist to plant his feet and his feats. Against the Conqueror Worm, Howard sets the worm-conqueror in not only The Valley of the Worm but also Red Nails.

In 1938 J. R. R. Tolkien, moonlighting as a draconologist not long after he had unleashed Smaug, “the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities,” in The Hobbit, assured an audience of children in an Oxford lecture that a dragon is “more terrible than any dinosaur” and “the final test of heroes,” so it is quite fitting that a dragon should test Conan the Cimmerian in his final adventure (final in the sense of last to be written). Howard’s hero brings, of course, a forthrightly American attitude to the confrontation: “There’s no law against killing a dragon, is there?” is his libertarian question to Olmec in an early draft of Red Nails. In his indispensable Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien makes the case that “there are in any case many heroes but very few good dragons,” and faults the Beowulf-dragon for “not being dragon enough,” due to trace elements of symbolism and allegory that threaten to dilute the effectiveness of “some vivid touches of the right kind.” His ideal is a “real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own.” Howard’s dragon in Red Nails is nothing but vivid touches and bestial life, hungry, enraged, vengeful—woe betide any allegorical readings foolish enough to be caught downwind of him. He squats “watching [Conan and Valeria’s crag] with the frightful patience of the reptile folk. So might one of his brood have glared up at their troglodyte ancestors, treed on a high-flung rock, in the dim dawn ages.” Later he wallows on the ground “like a dog with pepper in its eyes,” and “a noisy gurgling and lapping” betrays his attempt to quench his poison-inflamed thirst.

Conan, who will soon be faced with the riotously unnatural Xuchotl, broad-jumps the abyss of ages and the great divide between mammal and reptile to accept the dragon as a fellow natural born killer: “He attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it.” Unlike Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane, he does not need to dine on dragon-heart to gain understanding, and that he feels “a kinship with all wild things, even dragons” makes Conan wilder and the dragon more real. Seldom exhibiting an appetite for fantasy of any sort, the American pantheon has never been motivated to seek out a definitive New World dragonslaying, but were it to do so, Red Nails would be waiting.

Like many Americans, some of whom are now pantheon residents, Howard preferred to skirt, or slink away from, certain of the misshapen menhirs and dolmens that stand out so starkly in our psychic landscape. Comforting though it would be to report that he was ahead of his time in his views on people who did not look like him, he was simply, even simplistically, of his time in his over-reliance on “race,” a construct both highly artificial and built with the shoddiest of materials, as an organizing principle. Howardists are fond of recalling one occasion on which Steven R. Trout, for whom the celebrating-in-the-endzone triumphalism of Wings in the Night about the “white-skinned conqueror” just got to be too much, remarked, “I don’t remember ever seeing such a clear indication that ol’ Bob would’ve lost money had he bet the Louis/Schmeling fight.”

Still, when considering a story like this volume’s Pigeons from Hell it is worth remembering that African-Americans stimulated Howard’s imagination when he was a child—witness one tale he recalled to Lovecraft, invariably set in “the ruins of a once thriving plantation,” in which “always, as [vagrants] approach the high-columned verandah through the high weeds that surround the house, great numbers of pigeons rise from their roosting places on the railing and fly away”—and, in ways that will not appease all readers nowadays, troubled his conscience when he was an adult. “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” insists Quentin Compson when he is accused of hating the South at the end of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Howard, a Southwesterner rather than a Southerner, was never quite as much on the defensive as is Harvard student Quentin “in the iron New England dark.” And yet we should not lose sight of the fact that “South” comes before “west” in the word “Southwest,” so Southern pride goes before, or remains after, a fall, the possibility of which would never have occurred to the less history-burdened. Clark Edward Clifford acknowledges the complicated shadows in his In the Deep Heart’s Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas: “Even if we manage to kill Mexicans and Indians with John Wayne remorselessness, Southern-ness lurks in the shadows, ever ready to remind us that we too have done something wrong, have lost a war, have declined, have once been human.”

Have once been human—or, in some instances, inhuman. “Her past and her traditions are close to my heart, though I would be a stranger within her gates,” Howard once wrote of the South, and Griswell, the (Lovecraft-esque?) New Englander of Pigeons From Hell, permits the Texan to return as a stranger to the strangest of American lands. If not quite a first person narrator, Griswell is first among equals as a third person actor in the story; he’s the viewpoint character, and his viewpoint is that of “frantic abhorrence of these black woods, the ancient plantation houses that hid forgotten secrets of slavery and bloody pride.” Howard was capable of confiding, “I have often wished strongly that I had lived on the ancestral plantations in the Deep South in the days before the Civil War,” or maintaining that the horrors of slavery were frequently exaggerated, but we have evidence that he was not so much a loyal son as a transplanted grandson who knew a bit too much to be quite as loyal as he would have liked.

In Pigeons he does not insult our intelligence with blameless Blassenvilles, social workers who happen to own a plantation, apostles of outreach and uplift victimized by their motivelessly malevolent maid Joan. But neither can he bring himself to insult regional pride by attributing to a rootedly Southern, irreproachably bloodlined family atrocious mismanagement of their human property. So the Blassenvilles turn out to be of European origin and Caribbean extremism, in Sheriff Buckner’s words a “French-English family. Came here from the West Indies before the Louisiana Purchase. The Civil War ruined them, like it did so many.” Quicker to apply the whip and slower to leave off because they “got their ideas in the West Indies,” as Buckner puts it, the family is convenient for Howard’s conflicted purposes, and it is only logical that Celia, “the last one of the family to come to these parts,” hence even less of an adoptive Southerner than her relatives, is the cruelest of the cruel.

While Celia is drawn to voodoo culture, Joan, her victim and subsequent victimizer, has “white blood in her,” and pride of her own. In a sense they are each other’s weird sisters, and instead of an American melting pot Pigeons posits a bubbling witches’ cauldron in which what should be the boundaries between Celia and Joan dissolve—the identities and fates of the two characters are not disentangled until the final paragraph. Howard’s dark American fantasy reflects multihued American reality in that the disentanglement of fates and identities is impossible.

In the quasi-autobiographical Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, Howard’s false start at a novel in the late Twenties, his alter ego announces, “Now, I wish for a fair craft, three-masted, full-sailed, with a fair wind and a clear sea path—to where? The Isles of Yesterday, mayhap, or the coasts of Romance, or the beaches of Adventure, or the turquoise sea of Dawn.” But by the time he wrote to fellow pulp pro E. Hoffmann Price on February 15, 1936, he lamented having “gone so far along the path of romantic-exotic writing that it’s devilish difficult to find my way back to common-place realism, and yet every urge in me is to write realism.” Realism nevertheless accompanied him on that romantic-exotic path; Post Oaks & Sand Roughs provides the too-much-too-soon observation, “A boom town drugstore is an ideal place to study humanity,” and in 1931 Howard told Farnsworth Wright, “My boyhood was spent in the oil country—or rather oil came into the country when I was still a young boy, and remained.” Oil came, oil remained—where others saw a windfall, a resource to be exploited, Howard saw an invading force, an occupying army. In many of his letters he stole a march on the distinguished historian Bernard DeVoto, who in works like 1947’s Across the Wide Missouri described the American West as “a plundered province,” one that was being “systematically looted.”

“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” Roosevelt declared in his First Inaugural in 1933. The temples of Howard’s civilizations were frequently the haunts of horrors, so he presumably approved of FDR’s words. If, like the Thirties-redolent hard-boileds in the pages of Black Mask, certain Conan stories flirt with vulgar Marxism, vulgar Marxism has aged better than any other kind. “Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food,” the Cimmerian marvels in The Black Stranger, and when a former fence protests that he is now “respectable” in The Hour of the Dragon, Conan’s derisive reply is, “Meaning you’re rich as hell.” Another story dispenses with “the long, long ago when another world lifted its jeweled spires to the stars” while retaining the low expectations of high finance. At the start of Wild Water a bankrupt farmer’s unspeaking but unyielding neighbors, who ensure by their “hard-eyed” auction attendance that his property is not snapped up but instead sold right back to him for a pittance, are familiar to us from Depression iconography. This story outdoes Vultures of Wahpeton in depositing the Howard hero in a situation, in a civilization, where he can no longer be the Howard hero. “Times is changed, can’t you understand?” another character says to Jim Reynolds, “a throwback, the personification of atavism.” Hailing from “the high ridge of the Lost Knob country” (Did Howard intend a joke about post-frontier emasculation when he fictionalized Cross Plains as Lost Knob?) Reynolds is both “dark as an Indian” and the owner of a Ford roadster. Although still a bit larger than life, he is smaller than the system at the center of which sits Saul Hopkins, the financier who pulls strings “to which were tied loans and mortgages and the subtle tricks of finance.” (As Howard saw fit to bestow “the hooked nose of a vulture” upon him, it comes as a relief that the character’s last name is Hopkins.)

“I am hemmed in by laws, laws, laws,” Kull roars in By This Axe I Rule!, but he ultimately shatters the most superannuated of those laws. Jim Reynolds, born into a different sort of Pre-Cataclysmic Age, is far more hemmed in. He can gun down the king of Locust Valley, but can never hope to declare himself “king, state, and law!” like Kull. State and Law are too much for him, or any man, as the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of the frontier in the more-than-meteorological storm of Wild Water. Like Harry Morgan, gutshot in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Reynolds dies cursing, done in not by the lawmen with whom he is hell-bent on shooting it out, but by a friend. That friend, Bill Emmett, has taken up residence where those wronged by modernity often relocate, in the Book of Revelations, from which he is eager to visit an “awful mountain of black water” on the low-lying town of Bisley and witness the “Locust and Mesquital rollin’ down like the rivers of Judgment.” Although “on the devil’s business,” Emmett can quote scripture, but he is also capable of summoning the authentic voice of the twentieth century: “You’re small stuff; you killed one enemy. I aim to kill thousands!”

Volume II of The Best of Robert E. Howard ends with one of his most memorable poems, which doubles as a prelude or overture to the Conan series. Cimmeria came to Howard just before the favorite son of that “land of Darkness and the Night” did, and the “I” who speaks throughout the poem, who effects the beautifully intuitive shift from “winds and clouds, and dreams that shun the sun” to “clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun” is not Conan but his creator. “I remember,” that “I” declares; one cannot remember the future, and the absolute power that not-always mournful but neverending remembrance exercised over Howard may help to explain both the brevity of his life and the longevity of his storytelling. Cimmeria may not be a state of the Union, but it is a state of mind, and as its creator stands before the pantheon-gates the fairminded should recognize the heritage that “wraps [him] in the grey apparel of ghosts.”

He was an American classic as early as The Shadow Kingdom and its follow-up The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, which asks, “What worlds within what worlds [await] the bold explorer?” and cranes from the Siege Perilous of the Valusian throne to glimpse “some far country of [Kull’s] consciousness.” Assessing his body of work, such as it then was, to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in February 1929, Howard poor-mouthed Mirrors as “vague and badly written; this is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth.” A good many classic American writers got to be classics by venturing out of their depth and diving instead of drowning, and in this story Howard discovered just how deep his depth truly was. The Hall of a Thousand Mirrors offers reflections that some who do not dream enough would never dream of encountering in a sword-and-sorcery story; Tuzun Thune’s glassy surfaces reflect W. H. Auden’s insight that most American stories “are parables; their settings, even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia.”[6]

The wizard’s mirrors also reflect Ann Douglas’ contention that an American trademark is the “[displacement of] mimesis . . . to what the critic Richard Poirier, speaking of American narrative and borrowing a term from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, has called ‘a world elsewhere.’ Forced into exile, Coriolanus turns the tables on those who exile him by telling them, ‘I’ll banish you. There is a world elsewhere.’ ” Douglas sees the “willful conversion of exile from the known and familiar world into an enhanced power of exploration and vision in another unknown but compelling world, this exchange of the recognizably real for a place or mode defined as more insistently real, a place where provincials are recognized as sovereigns” as the “central strategy of classic American literature.” Kull, already exiled from his native Atlantis and a provincial grudgingly recognized as a sovereign, in Mirrors reaches the point of susceptibility to exchanging the recognizably real for the at-first-phantasmal-but-then-more-insistently real: “Day by day had he seemed to lose touch with the world; all things had seemed each succeeding day more ghostly and unreal.” Pantheon, please note: neither wars nor women nor wealth are won in Mirrors or The Tower of the Elephant—these are not stories of wish fulfillment but rather perspective-enhancement, imagination-enlargement.

Howard might have lit his pioneering torch in an unpromising hinterland, but he kindled imaginations around the world. That he lived and died with no inkling of the passion that his passionate storytelling would eventually ignite, or the power with which artists would respond to his power, is intolerable. He has created many, many readers and not a few writers as well, the more conscientious of whom have been determined, not to write like Howard but rather to write, like Howard. Brian Attebery accords L. Frank Baum, imperfections and all, the status of “our Grimm and our Andersen, the man who introduced Americans to their own dreams.” Despite being an imperfect man and writer, Howard told perfectly wonderful stories that reintroduced twentieth-century Americans (and much of the world) to their own nightmares—but also to the chance of triumph, however hard-won and soon-lost, over those nightmares.

By now our confidence that Robert E. Howard could not help thinking or writing five classically American things before breakfast each morning must be apparent. “A writer who wishes to produce something both American and fantastic” is for Attebery compelled to “move against the currents, restoring what has been lost over the years or finding eddies of tradition that have resisted the general erosion of the marvelous.” It’s time to acknowledge that Howard, whose sense of loss was at least as keen as his other five senses, was eminently qualified to undertake such tasks. So here’s to a viable, meritocratic, and open-audition-offering pantheon, one into which this author will not have to fight his way once his ability to write his way in is better known. His induction will leave the pantheon more sensitive to the call of the wild and the pall of the mild; more tragic but also more comic; more fantastic but also more realistic; brawnier, but more poetic; more physical, but more haunted. No other country in the world could have produced a Robert E. Howard, and, regrettably, few other countries would have been as slow to realize his stature and significance. But as the afterlives of earlier classic writers’ work have taught us, late is still much, much better than never.

Index

Notes

[1] “Civilized” and “barbaric” have continued to glower at each other in post-Howardian popular culture. The 1971 film The Omega Man is unsatisfactory as an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic pandemic-of-vampirism novel I Am Legend, but Anthony Zerbe’s Matthias could be channeling Howard when he says to Charlton Heston’s Neville, “Barbarians? You call us barbarians? Well, it is an honorable name. We mean to cancel the world you civilized people made.”

[2] While abnormally dangerous, Conan is not “normally brutish”—a brutish hero would have been no hero at all to Howard. In his first-ever sale to Weird Tales, the Cro-Magnon versus Neanderthal grudge-match Spear and Fang, the protagonist Ga-nor is an artist, a “past master” of cave painting. Had Shippey had the chance to read the Conan stories in order of composition, as can now be done by way of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan, before seeing the Cimmerian in action he would have seen him in inaction, refusing to hang the seditious Rinaldo because “a great poet is greater than any king.”

[3] Howard seemingly takes direct aim at Cyrus in his only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon. Squiring his readers through the “palm trees and orange groves” of the sun-and-soil-blessed province of Poitain, he writes, “It is not only the hard lands that breed hard men.”

[4] We can be sure that Howard would have scrambled to see King Kong, but he did not share his reaction to the film in any letter that has survived. What is known is that he “got a big whang out of [Eugene] O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,” and in one of the poems included in this volume, “Never Beyond the Beast,” he warns of the inescapability of “the blind black brutish passion—the lust of the primal Ape.” Another poem cautions that “a strange shape comes to your faery mead/With a fixed black simian frown.”

[5] Katherine Anne Porter (1890—1980), who was born in Indian Creek, Texas, and grew up in Kyle, is best known for stories such as Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Noon Wine, and her late-in-life novel Ship of Fools. Porter’s first short story was published in 1922, so she beat Howard into print by three years. She also beat him out of Texas by a lifetime, and her relocations to Mexico, Greenwich Village, and Europe led McMurtry in Southwestern Literature? to draw a line in the dirt, like Travis at the Alamo, and pointedly exclude her: “Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” Just how free of the state Porter ever was can be debated; in 1975 she insisted, “I happen to be the first native of Texas in its whole history to be a professional writer.” This claim to fame goes all the way back to Virgil’s primus ego in patriam mecum deducam musas (“for I shall be the first to bring the Muse into my country”), but it is disappointing that no one chronicling the history of Texas letters has ever juxtaposed Porter’s statement and Howard’s.

Like his, her imagination was jump-started by a yarn-spinning grandmother, and like him, she compensated for the lack of a formal higher education by ferociously concentrated autodidacticism: both writers illustrate the celebrated “Root, hog, or die” ideology in action. Arrestingly for students of the Howard-Lovecraft correspondence, Porter devoted fifty years to a biography of Cotton Mather, even living in Salem during 1927 and 1928 to absorb some witch-hunting atmosphere, but never finished the book.

[6] Psychomachia: soul-strife, the mind warring on itself.

The Best of Robert E. Howard

Contents

Vol. 1, Crimson Shadows

Foreword

Introduction

Robert E. Howard:

Twentieth-Century Mythmaker

by Charles Hoffman

Serving Time in Disillusionment

A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard

by Rusty Burke

Vol. 2, Grim Lands

Foreword

Introduction

Barbarian at the Pantheon-Gates

Index

The Best of Robert E. Howard

Contents

Vol. 1, Crimson Shadows

Foreword

Introduction

Robert E. Howard:Twentieth-Century Mythmakerby Charles Hoffman

Serving Time in Disillusionment

A Short Biography of Robert E. Howardby Rusty Burke

Vol. 2, Grim Lands

Foreword

Introduction

Barbarian at the Pantheon-Gates

Index

Robert E. Howard:

Twentieth-Century Mythmaker

by Charles Hoffman

A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard

by Rusty Burke