It has been exactly 100 years since the birth of Robert Ervin Howard, a writer I have come to revere in much the same way I do Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Burroughs, Howard created many varied and memorable characters and like Tolkein, he created mythological ages for his characters to inhabit, the most famous of course being the barbarian Conan.

Robert E. Howard was born in a small Texas town on January 22nd, 1906. His father was a doctor and much of his childhood was spent living in various small towns throughout Texas and Oklahoma before the family settled in Cross Plains, Texas in 1919. Howard grew up with a passion for the written word, “As a boy and a youth in my teens, I read purely for the love of reading. I can say with confidence that no man ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me.” Robert E. Howard had a great affection for both fiction and poetry and reading over his list of favorite authors arouses a feeling of great kinship despite our existence in different generations: Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. So much of the work that influenced him then continues to fire imaginations today. Howard was also known as a famed oral storyteller, often reading his tales aloud as he typed them and he loved to regale friends with stories.

Robert E. Howard began writing at a very young age and he submitted his first story for publication at age 15. It wasn’t until the age of 19 that he was first published, when his short story Spear and Fang was accepted by the magazine Weird Tales. Howard was very pragmatic about his desire to be a writer: “My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it…I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any other job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.” To please his father Howard had taken a bookkeeping course and agreed that if he could not make it as a writer in a year he would quit and get a regular paying job. He sold four stories that year and his career as a writer began. Personal freedom and control were touchstone issues for Howard and these came out in his work.

Robert E. Howard’s stories were not originally written to be published in book form…the stories he wrote were for the adventure magazines of his day, Weird Tales, Wild West Weekly, Spicy Adventure Stories, Strange Detective, etc. Howard was unique in that he created several serialized characters. While he was writing these he often felt inhabited by the character and would write several stories about said character and would eventually lose the inspiration for that character and move on to another. That writing style gave us characters like King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, El Borak, Red Sonya and of course Conan. Each of Howard’s characters inhabited the same “universe” starting with the pre-historic adventures of Kull up through Howard’s created Hyborian Age of Conan. “Howard engineered his tales so that a great Cataclysm always came to seal and divide each era from the next one, so each civilization was barely conscious of the ones that came before, and even then only in myths and legends”. The Conan tales have continued to keep Robert E. Howard’s name in the limelight but it would be a great disservice to think that this is all that he did. In his brief lifetime Howard wrote over 300 short stories, only 22 of which are about Conan. Howard wrote poetry, westerns, fantasy, horror…he was great friends with H.P. Lovecraft and wrote one or two tales that today are considered a part of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Conan tales are nothing more than a written version of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan films. I had not read any of Robert E. Howard’s work until Jeff recommended Dark Horse Comics’ new Conan series last year. Cary Nord’s art and Kurt Busiek’s reworking of Howard’s tales are amazing and they drove me to pick up his books. In the next few days I will post more about the Conan stories specifically.

Robert E. Howard is widely considered to be the father of the Sword and Sorcery genre…a genre based on war, fighting and magic. Howard liked to box and his real life experience with fighting translates well on the page. Many consider his descriptions of fighting and battle to be some of the best in fiction.

Tragically Robert E. Howard’s life was cut short. His mother was terminally ill and in 1936 as her health turned for the worse Howard began planning his death. Hester Howard sank into a coma on June 8th, 1936. On the morning of June 11th his mother’s nurse confirmed that she was unlikely to revive from this coma. Howard went into his room, typed this couplet:

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

went out to his car and shot himself. His robust constitution resulted in his living for almost 8 hours after this before finally succumbing to death. Robert E. Howard left behind a wealth of amazing storytelling and it is a tragedy that he left life so early as his writing seemed to get better and better with each story…who knows what great and wonderful literary characters died with him that day.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of this underappreciated American writer I will be posting more about him, his works, and things based on his characters throughout the week. As long as this post is it doesn’t even skim the surface of this fascinating writer. There is an excellent 18 page biography of Robert E. Howard here that is a must read.

Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard.

(Conan image by Frank Frazetta)