Robert E. Howard playing pirate in his land-locked yard in Cross Plains, Texas.
I write you again today not to promote Fantastic Realms, but to honor the memory of a fantasy legend.
Today, Jan. 22, marks the 114th birthday of American author Robert E. Howard.
Howard invented many characters over the course of his career in the "pulps," including puritan crusader Solomon Kane and hot-tempered boxer Sailor Steve Costigan. But he's certainly best known for Conan the Cimmerian--better known today as Conan the Barbarian, thanks to a 1970s Marvel Comics series and the 1982 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My first exposure to Conan was in my grandfather's library, where books on military history and engineering sat next to tattered paperbacks featuring aliens, robots, rippling strong men with swords, and buxom women dressed in tattered dishcloths. That library reflected his personality perfectly--an overpowering (often intimidating) seriousness of character coupled with an enduring, almost boyish, love of the weird and the adventurous. When he described the premises of these early 20th Century Burroughs and Howard novels to me, he spoke with a special tone of respect. But my adolescent tastes leaned towards computers and spaceships, so I always passed over those quaint-seeming fantasy tales to leaf through old copies of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.
Strangely, I became fascinated by Robert Howard the Man a full decade before I read a single word of Conan the Cimmerian. When I was 21, I picked up a book titled "Genius and Heroin," an encyclopedia of artists and their self-destructive habits. Howard was barely a footnote, but only his entry has remained burned into my memory.
Born in Texas in 1906, Howard spent the first third of his life traveling from rural town to rural town (his father was a country doctor), and the latter two-thirds in the small town of Cross Plains. Though he loved boxing and wrestling, he was a sickly boy with a heart condition, and his mother kept him close to home. She herself lived with tuberculosis, and Howard became her nurse whenever she fell ill. Hester Howard was well-educated, and she instilled her son with a love of poetry and literature. His habit of bringing books everywhere he went was considered eccentric in a town where men made their living from the plow or the oil field.
His neighbors only found it more strange when he made his career as a writer (not least because he had a habit of shouting his stories out loud as he typed them). But his subject matter was in perfect harmony with his surroundings, insofar as his subject matter was violence. Early 20th Century Texas was America's last frontier, and the oil boom in Cross Plains attracted rough men looking for fast money (not unlike Conan). Gunshot and knife wounds were frequently among the ailments that helped young Robert's father put food on the table. The corruption of local oil barons and politicians prejudiced the author against the excesses of civilization, a theme that frequently recurred in his stories.
In many ways, Howard aspired to the rough life that surrounded him, and in this we see how contradictory he was. He was brilliant and bookish, but took photos of himself boxing with friends or posing menacingly with weapons. He lived his entire life in his parents' home, but wrote about globetrotting adventure. His characters caroused with every woman in sight, but he only had one girlfriend and spent much of his time nursing his tuberculosis-stricken mother through bouts of illness. When his mother fell into a coma from which he was told she would never wake, he was so shattered that he immediately went home and took his own life at the age of 30.
Howard's life was far too short. But his literary output would have been incredible even for a writer twice his age. He penned more than 400 stories and several of novels--spanning Westens, horror, fantasy, sports, comedy--in a career that lasted barely more than a decade.
Conan is his most enduring creation of all. Though Howard birthed the sword-and-sorcery genre through his Kull of Atlantis stories, it was Conan--the iron-thewed barbarian with volcanic blue eyes--who inspired countless other authors to send characters off into strange lands in search of gold and glory. My character Kurik'har the Orc certainly has Conan DNA--the pirate tale "Queens of the Black Coast" provided ample swashbuckling inspiration for the Kurik'har story "The Rag Kings of Vanais."
Happy Birthday, Robert. You're an American titan.
Cheers,
Mark
Sadly, though Robert E. Howard was prolific, scholarly information on his life is scarce. I'm currently enjoying the biography "Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard," written by Mark Finn and published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation in Cross Plains, which maintains a museum in his former home. Howard's stories are easy to find in reprinted collections of his works. Indeed, e-book collections of his entire bibliography can be picked for the princely sum of $2-$3.