Ok for those that know me it is no secret that Robert E. Howard is one of my first heroes. I discovered Conan when i was 12. In the summer of that year i used all of my hard earned allowence to purchase the 12 books in the Conan Series published by Ace. This collection was lovingly reconstructed and the gaps filled in by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. To a boy my age the larger than life Conan lept off the page and thrilled me to no end and managed to transport me to places i could never go by myself....In fact it was Howard that made me want to pick up a pen and write my own stories.....As I got older I tracked down the Solomon Kane stories, as well as Kull of Valusia, and Bran Mak Morn. Conan and Howard Both still hold a special place in my memories (although as i age i find myself drawn more to Solomon Kane) Recently I picked up a copy of Weird Tales magazine on a whim and discovered that the company that owns the magazine is reprinting all of Howards works from the magazine (as i type this i have placed my order for all 10 books even though i will probably overlap my already large howard library) I also came across this article and thought that it deserved a larger audience......
commentary by Leo Grin
On January 22, 2006, at a desolate crossroads in the windswept cowtown of Peaster, Texas, a gathering of men stood reverently in a chill downpour. These weren’t local ranch hands or mud-soaked oil riggers, they were fantasy fans — editors, scholars, and aficionados, from places as far away as Washington DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Each had journeyed hundreds of miles through sleet and rain on a Quixotic quest of tribute. For exactly one hundred years earlier, in that isolated Texas hamlet, the ailing wife of a grizzled frontier doctor gave birth to a man whose name still echoes like a grim knell across the fantasy genre’s dreamscape. The father of Sword-and-Sorcery. The creator of Conan.Robert Ervin Howard. That same morning, sleepy-eyed readers of The Washington Post were treated to a
book column by popular critic Michael Dirda, who seized upon the occasion of Howard’s one-hundredth birthday to review Del Rey Books’ sumptuous new series of fully-illustrated, textually-restored Conan books. Dirda assured readers who harbor a dislike for pulp fantasy that “approached as guilty pleasures, [the Conan stories] can be wonderfully entertaining,” then made a measured case for Howard’s literary worth. “Howard’s Conan chronicles,” Dirda wrote, “are... studies in the clash of Barbarism and Civilization. In Howard’s grim and all too realistic view, the barbarians are always at the gate, and once a culture allows itself to grow soft, decadent or simply neglectful, it will be swept away by the primitive and ruthless.” He ended with a judgment that is old hat among fantasy fans, but one which many critics and academics are only now belatedly acknowledging: “Apart from Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, sword and sorcery adventures don’t come any better.” Amen. As criticism goes, Dirda’s insightful analysis is a far cry from sixty years ago, when playwright H.R. Hays greeted Howard’s first American hardcover appearance — the now-classic 1946 Arkham House release Skull-Face and Others — with a scathing review in The New York Times titled “Superman on a Psychotic Bender.” Of course, Dirda’s no long-dead, forgotten blowhard — he won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Clearly, time and age have been good to Robert E. Howard. The man whom H.P. Lovecraft christened “Two-Gun Bob” left us a large, fascinating body of work encompassing not only the birth of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre, but also the misery of the Great Depression, the bittersweet memory of the American frontier, and the millennial sweep of War and Time and History. Howard’s work is increasingly perceived as a modern continuation of the gloomy, homegrown literature pioneered by giants such as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and London. For decades known as one of the Big Three Weird Tales writers, he is now also being studied and respected as a Texan writer, a 1930s writer, and a classic American writer. My, how times have changed. A few decades ago, critics and reviewers dismissed Conan as adolescent fantasies for perpetually adolescent minds. Exciting and action-packed and passionate? Yes! But Art? Literature? Fuhgettaboutit. Granted, not everyone thought that way. Fritz Leiber’s REH criticism was uncommonly perceptive, and remains as useful now as when it was written decades ago. [He coined the term Sword-and-Sorcery, now being considered for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe the Conan stories.] And most fans have never heard the great anecdote L. Sprague de Camp relates in his autobiography Time and Chance, about his enjoyable afternoon spent in Tolkien’s garage study, drinking and conversing with the legendary fantasist. When the subject turned to Howard, de Camp fully expected Tolkien — an infamous curmudgeon when it came to modern fantasy — to dismiss the Texan out of hand, if indeed he had read him at all. But to his surprise, Tolkien not only confirmed that he had read Howard, but admitted without shame that he “rather liked” the Conan tales — high praise indeed coming as it did from one of the harshest critics of the field. Still, the likes of Leiber and Tolkien were exceptions. According to most of Howard’s fellow professionals, his work was forever marred by its pulp roots and his legendary psychological problems. Today, such opinions are as outdated as a ’59 Edsel. The cheap, gaudy paperbacks of yore are now deluxe illustrated volumes lovingly restored to match Howard’s original typescripts. Fantasy authors routinely credit Howard as a seminal influence revered among their ranks. Critical books and magazines have prompted teachers to finally include Howard on reading lists and syllabi. (I recently read a feature about one such teacher in the Antelope Valley Press, a popular Southern California newspaper with a readership of 250,000 — apparently his assigning Howard to students as extra credit caused a stampede to nearby bookstores, making Howard a sellout for miles around!)To readers whose last experience with Howard was reading Conan as a teenager, all of this may seem shocking. But to those of us who have been enmeshed in Howard studies for a long time, getting face-time in The Washington Post from a Pulitzer Prize-winner is merely the latest in a string of breakthroughs for the Texan.Back in the late 1960s, when science-fiction grandmaster L. Sprague de Camp ushered the whole Conan saga into paperback for the first time, the resulting surge in Conan’s popularity created a tidal wave known ever since as the “Howard Boom.” It was a heady time for fans — virtually everything Howard ever wrote was published in one form or another. Incomplete stories, high school newspaper articles, juvenilia — nothing was too unfinished or just plain bad to stick into a paperback and foist upon Conan fanatics. Boxing tales, westerns, and detective stories were all encased in covers deceptively hinting at Sword-and-Sorcery pleasures, each emblazoned with “By the creator of CONAN!” Readers were grateful for the deluge, even while lamenting that some critics were judging Howard not by his best work but by haphazard paperbacks containing his very worst writing, stuff he never intended to publish.As the Howard Boom died out in the early ’80s, scholars quietly went through a decade of sifting through all of this new material and reëvaluating his reputation. Those who came to Howard as Conan fans often left with a newfound respect for his poetry, westerns, crusader tales, horror, and boxing stories. Crucially, a well-reviewed critical book called The Dark Barbarian appeared in 1984 from a respected academic press. Meticulously assembled and edited by critic Don Herron, it intelligently covered the whole of Howard’s output, demonstrating that the creator of Conan could and should be taken more seriously. A few years later, several volumes of Howard’s letters were published by Necronomicon Press, showing “crazy” Howard in a light few had fathomed: as a savvy businessman, a frequent, wide-ranging traveler, a good friend, and a passionate literary artist all-too-aware of the way people perceived him.As time passed, Howard’s hometown at long last began to preserve the legacy of their most famous resident. In 1986, a group of fans and civic leaders in Cross Plains combined forces to establish
Robert E. Howard Days, a festival that takes place the second weekend each June to celebrate Howard’s life and work. Over the years it has grown into a vastly entertaining mini-convention hosting over a hundred fans, complete with tours, panels, awards, a banquet, and viewings of all the places about which Howard worked, traveled, and wrote. The original house Howard lived and wrote in has been beatifically restored into one of the country’s most charming literary museums, prompting its addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Once a forgotten figure in Cross Plains, Howard now is the town’s shining light. The same year Howard Days began, his former girlfriend Novalyne Price-Ellis, then an elderly retired schoolteacher, published an autobiographical book called One Who Walked Alone about her years spent dating REH at the end of his life. The volume revealed Howard to be a much more conscientious and dedicated craftsman than even his most ardent fans had suspected. Howard’s passion for the history and culture of his beloved Southwest, his trenchant explanations of the thematic threads tying together his oeuvre, and his insistence on the artistry underlying his pulp writing opened up new avenues of study. When in 1996 the book was made into a critically praised film titled
The Whole Wide World, starring Renée Zellweger and Vincent D’Onofrio (the movie appeared on over fifty critics’ Top Ten lists for that year), Howard’s appeal broadened outside his fantasy roots yet again, sometimes attracting fans in strange places. (For instance, in recent years I have noticed a number of new women at Howard Days — apparently The Whole Wide World has been screened on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network cable channel so often that it has made Howard a romantic figure among housewives!)Because of his letters, Novalyne’s book and film, and various other interviews and evidence, Howard’s personality has now been radically re-defined in the minds of fans. Previous generations took it at face value that Howard was, in a word, nuts — a crazed, paranoid eccentric living a schizophrenic life comprised of half reality and half fantasy, whose writing poured out in lengthy marathon fits of genius that eventually culminated in a senseless Oedipal suicide. Today, much more is known about Howard’s life and motivations, and the old gossipy tales have lost their power to convince. By degrees, the dominant image of Howard the Crazed Nut has given way to Howard the Misunderstood Artist. By the time John Milius recorded his interview for a new Conan the Barbarian DVD in 2000, gleefully recounting all the silly old canards of a schizoid Howard haunted by the ghost of Conan and holed up in a boarded-up house with a shotgun sweating his terror-filled nights away, most fans knew better than to believe any part of the tale. Throughout most of the ’80s and ’90s Howard studies were going gangbusters, yet the publishing of the actual stories was moribund, lost to legal wrangling among various parties intent on gaining control of Howard’s valuable literary properties. Conglomerates with money to burn brought Conan back in a series of ill-advised projects. From a risible Saturday morning cartoon to lame comic-book retreads to a wretched live-action television show, each attempt to recapture the Boom magic flopped among fans, who pined for more faithful and intelligent fare geared to match their newfound respect for the author.The Boom’s pimply-faced teens had grown up, and no longer would they gobble down the latest tripe passed off as “faithful to Howard.” They wanted the real thing, presented with the class that the author deserved.Eventually, they got it. One by one the lawsuits were settled, the lawyers faded away, and it became possible to publish Howard in something resembling a principled fashion. In 1996 Baen came out with seven paperbacks containing much of Howard’s non-Conan output, but scant advertising and publicity combined with corrupt texts doomed the series to only moderate success and no reprintings. Efforts by English publisher
Wandering Star to produce lavishly illustrated and textually pure volumes of Howard’s best work, a “Robert E. Howard Library of Classics,” were more successful. Six books have been released to date, all widely praised for their scholarship and presentation. The stunning quality of these expensive collectors’ volumes attracted the interest of Del Rey, who is now filling bookstores with
affordable trade-paper and hard-cover editions of each. It was this series, specifically designed to promote Howard as a classic American author worthy of critical attention, that caught Pulitzer Prize winner Dirda’s attention and prompted his Washington Post piece.In the wake of Wandering Star and Del Rey, other publishers began filling the marketplace with an array of riches that have fans talking delightedly of a second Howard Boom.
Wildside Press is currently producing a ten-volume hardcover set encompassing all of
Howard’s classic Weird Tales works, and they have other volumes out dedicated to his detective, crusader, humorous boxing, and western tales. Last year
Bison Books, a prestigious academic press based at the University of Nebraska, released five elegant hardcovers of Howard’s best non-Conan work, each edited and introduced by a longtime Howard scholar.
Girasol Books, a pulp reprint house based in Canada, has released two massive books containing Howard’s complete Weird Tales output (including not only stories, but also all of his WT poems and letters to the editor), with the pages scanned directly from the pulps in facsimile form, exactly as they appeared in "The Unique Magazine" more than seventy years ago.And all of that just covers Howard’s original stories. The previously mentioned critical anthology, 1984’s
The Dark Barbarian, has just been reprinted by Wildside Press in an affordable paperback edition, and in 2004 the same press released a captivating sequel titled
The Barbaric Triumph. A book of Howard’s complete poems — all seven hundred of them! — is in the works, set to be illustrated by famed Hellboy artist Mike Mignola. Several new Howard bibliographies are coming out next year, their gargantuan proportions a testament to the amount of Howardia produced over the last few decades. And scholar Mark Finn just completed the first full-length biography of Howard since 1983’s seminal work in the field, Dark Valley Destiny by L. Sprague de Camp. Titled Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard and weighing in at almost four hundred pages, Finn’s tome will hit bookstores in November. The buzz is that it’s good; watch for it.Publishers are not the only ones pushing Howard in the modern marketplace. A Swedish media conglomerate,
Paradox Entertainment, has spent the last few years buying up multimedia rights to Howard’s work, and they are gung-ho about reintroducing Conan and other characters to a whole new generation of fans. On the live-action front, a Bran Mak Morn movie has already been greenlighted, with movies based on Solomon Kane and Conan also in various stages of pre-production. As for animated films, a full-length feature based on the Conan tale “Red Nails” is nearing completion.
Video games, Hyborian pastiches,
comics... in all of these areas Howard and Conan is being re-seeded into the pop culture sphere almost faster than one can keep up.And let’s not forget the fans. The long-running organization
REHupa (The Robert E. Howard United Press Association) has entered its thirty-fourth year of continuous existence, and various editors are producing books, chapbooks, and literary journals at an impressive clip, using modern production techniques to eclipse in both quality and quantity the mountain of material published during the first Howard Boom. An example: my own semiprofessional journal,
The Cimmerian, pays three cents a word, appears bi-monthly (monthly during this centennial year), and is focused like a laser on Howard’s life and work. I say that any author supporting a paying market for literary criticism seventy years after his death has done something right.So, is this really a second Howard Boom? I think so, yes. Quieter than the halcyon, Frazetta-illustrated ’70s for sure, but perhaps in the final analysis a more mature, more permanent phenomenon. It’s undeniable that Howard has broken through the glass ceiling of “mere pulp writer” and into the permanent realm of cultural and literary relevance shared by fellow adventure authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dashiell Hammett, and Ian Fleming. There is no doubt in my mind this trend will continue, with Howard creeping further into arenas where he used to be persona non grata. For the first time, one is seeing REH panels at academic venues such as the yearly
PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) conference. He’s also starting to be included in critical books released by mainstream academic presses, such as the recent
Conversations with Texas Writers (University of Texas Press, 2005), a book where Howard had the distinct honor of being the only dead author represented.Perhaps most tellingly, Howard has gone international in a serious way. Forty volumes of his work, including minor miscellany such as his autobiographical novel Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, have been published in France alone. Russia has seen a hundred Conan books, both original Howard and pastiche, while countries as varied as Germany, Italy, Poland, and Japan all have REH available in translation and enough fans to make each new edition a viable publishing proposition. Once the new movies hit Hollywood’s increasingly internationalized marketplace, followed by the previously described onslaught of centennial publishing detritus, who knows how Howard’s worldwide popularity and literary reputation will be affected? Will we someday see Robert E. Howard and Conan join fellow pulpsters Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H.P. Lovecraft in prestigious venues such as The Library of America? I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Nor I daresay would Howard’s many fans, scholars, and professional champions, all of whom have known for some time that his best work is eminently worthy of such honors.Authors who remain read over the decades have a way of aging like fine wine. A hundred years on, Howard has yet to lose his foothold in the minds of appreciative readers, and every year he gains new supporters in academic and critical circles. New generations are primed to rediscover Conan and his brethren all over again. Now that we’ve reached the end of Howard’s first century, it’s worth asking what the next hundred years will hold. What do you think — will 2106 pass with REH finally forgotten along with the pulps that spawned him? Fifty years ago, the possibility of Howard’s reputation surviving the vast majority of his best-selling contemporaries was remote. But that was then. Nowadays, the future is looking pretty bright for lovers of Sword-&-Sorcery, and for the brilliant Texan who conjured the genre out of the darkness for us. Happy Birthday, Two-Gun.
* * *Leo Grin is editor of
The Cimmerian, a paying semiprofessional journal dedicated to the study of Robert E. Howard and his work. Contact him at
editor@thecimmerian.com.
Howard once said of Conan "He is the damnedest bastard that ever was!" It seems that most will only remember him for Conan he created so much more, and even though he was verbose (he got piad by the word) he was also prolific, and i feel through his writings that i got to know him just a little bit. I pulled one of my favorite stories off the shelf today and re-read it "The Devil in Iron" it still makes me want to stand on the edge of the coffee table with sword in hand and leap to adventures unknown......ah to be 13 again!
Sadly at the age of 30 in 1936 he climbed into the front seat of his car and blew his brains out.....We may never know why and the world was cheated of the things that still had not worked their way out of Howards fevered imagination.....
maybe i'll write a Howardesque story......then again can you truly emulate your heroes?
Here's to new generations discovering barbarians, and sword weilding puritans!
Later.....
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