The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 (75 page)

A S
HORT
B
IOGRAPHY
of R
OBERT
E. H
OWARD

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.”

Whatever his reasons, once Howard had determined upon his path, he kept at 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.