Books

Not many Texans know Robert E. Howard. Some overlook him deliberately, resenting comparisons to J. Frank Dobie and other greats of Texas literature. Maybe it's because he didn't write much about Texas. Or because he was, in his time, the king of the pulps, best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and better compared to Edgar Allan Poe or Dashiell Hammett.

Author of 800 stories, poems and novels written over 12 years, Howard was one of the most prolific Texas writers. Texas fantasy writer Joe Lansdale suggests he was a writer of importance, even if his impact was on the "dirty corner of literature."

Myths persist: Howard, affectionately known as REH to fans, was rumored to be a recluse or unnaturally close to his mother, who was a semi-invalid much of his life. Neither is true, as Mark Finn reports in his 2006 biography, Blood & Thunder: The Life of Robert E. Howard. Within the limits of Cross Plains, his lifelong home, Howard lived a normal life, had a girlfriend, went drinking with friends, traveled, corresponded with other authors and wrote tirelessly, pounding on an ancient typewriter in the sleeping porch that was both his bedroom and workroom.

Born in 1906, Howard grew up in the years of the oil boom. As a young man in the 1920s, he watched roughnecks, gamblers and opportunists. He once wrote a friend that growing up in an oil boomtown "will teach a kid that life's a pretty rotten thing." Howard translated that lesson into fiction. Mr. Lansdale says that Conan is indeed a combination of oil-field worker, rambling cowboy and card sharp.

The themes of Howard's work are the rise and fall of civilizations, echoing the rise and fall of Cross Plains as a boomtown. Howard had an unusual combination of talents, allowing him to write in an amazing variety of genres – horror, sword and sorcery, fantasy, Western – while also creating popular characters of lasting interest.

In addition to Conan, his heroes include Bran Mak Morn of early Great Britain; Solomon Kane, a Puritan swashbuckler with adventures in England, throughout Europe and Africa; King Kull, who lived before recorded history and whose stories are among the first sword-and-sorcery fiction; and the Texian, whose character was never fully developed.

Howard never grew attached to his characters and abandoned them after he felt their stories had been told.

He was the only son of a small-town doctor who tended victims of violence, from gunshots and stabbings to the accidents of farm life. But an even more important influence in Robert's life was his mother, who tried to protect him from the life around him.

He was forbidden to play football or any other sport Hester Howard thought violent, although she could not stop him from developing his boxing skills by practicing with friends.

When he met Novalyne Price, a schoolteacher, Hester tried hard to keep them apart. Hester loved poetry and probably nurtured Howard's literary interests.

At 15, Howard read a copy of the magazine Adventure. It became an enormous influence on his life and career. He began writing his own stories, breaking into print three years later in Weird Tales. By 1935, his income from writing was $6,000, higher than the salary of the local bank president.

Howard is supposed to have once said that the only thing keeping him alive was his mother's need for him. When she lay on her deathbed in 1936, unconscious, he committed suicide.

Today, his work appears in movies, television series, comic books and graphic novels. His extensive personal library is housed at Howard Payne University in Brownwood.

Cross Plains, a small, conservative West Texas town that was ravaged by fire in late 2005, hosts Robert E. Howard Days every June, with tours and events such as the annual Barbarian Festival. The Howard home, now a museum, is open to the public, and REH's original manuscripts are on display.

Judy Alter is director of the TCU Press in Fort Worth.

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