| |
| Texas
| People
Conan in Texas:
The Robert E. Howard
Story
by C.
F. Eckhardt
Photos Courtesy of
The Robert E.Howard
Museum
and Era Hanky
| "Barefoot
boy with cheek of tan"
Young Robert as Noble Savage |
Robert
Ervine Howard-you'll find the terminal E on his middle name on his birth certificate
and his tombstone, but nowhere else-was born either January 22 or January 24,
1906, in the Parker County town of Peaster, Texas. He was the only son and only
child of Dr. Isaac M. Howard and Hester Jane (Ervine) Howard.
Robert's
father seems to have been, although a physician, something of a milktoast type,
while his mother, though sickly most of her life, apparently had a strong, somewhat
controlling personality. Robert grew into a bookish, somewhat withdrawn child
who had few close friends. He also had an above-average intellect and a powerful
interest in history. |
| | A
more filled-out Howard about the time of his boxing career. |
| |
| As
a young man, Bob Howard, as his contemporaries knew him, was a robust six footer
weighing about 200 lbs, and an accomplished amateur boxer. He was also something
of a pre-Society for Creative Anachronism 'creative anachroniser.' He and friends
armed themselves with wooden shields and wooden swords to discover how the real
thing was used in the past. Most boys outgrow the 'wooden sword and garbage-can-lid
shield by the age of 8 or 9, but Howard continued well into his teens. |
| The
Howard Home - now the Robert E. Howard Museum
- just SE of downtown Cross
Plains |
By
the time he was 8 the Howard family settled in the community of Cross
Plains, Texas, near Brownwood.
Robert was a voracious reader, ultimately devouring every history book and historical
novel in the Cross Plains public library and the school libraries. At this point
he apparently taught himself the fine art of burglary. He traveled to surrounding
towns, entered the public libraries after dark, removed armloads of books, read
them and apparently made notes on them-and then made an after-dark return of the
books.
In his early teens Bob began to show a flair for writing fiction.
He apparently sold a few stories to various pulp magazines, but not many. His
father insisted he attend Howard Payne College in Brownwood,
and Bob spent a year there. When he returned, he told his father he intended to
become a writer of fiction, and college was doing him no good at all. Father and
son came to an agreement-Bob would have a year to prove he could support himself
as a writer of fiction. If at the end of the year he was not self-supporting,
he would return to Howard Payne and get a degree. At the end of the agreed-on
year Bob was not yet completely self-supporting, but he had cashed some-for the
time and place-fairly impressive checks. |
| | Howard's
porch bedroom / workroom. Mother's bedroom is through window at left. |
| |
| This
was the great era of the pulp magazine. Broadcast radio was in its infancy, television
was only in the Buck Rogers comic strip. The entertainment of the era was the
pulp fiction magazine-and there were myriads of them. From the 'dime novels' of
the late 19th Century, the magazine industry had grown into a giant. Specialized
fiction magazines ranged from general fiction to highly specialized. There were
baseball stories magazines, railroad stories magazines, airplane stories magazines-even
fighter airplane stories magazines. And, of course, there were fantasy, horror,
romance, science fiction, western-you name it, there was a pulp fiction magazine
that covered whatever you wanted to read. Into this Robert E. Howard plunged headfirst. |
| | Arnold
(as Conan) took time to autograph a publicity photo for the museum. |
| |
| Though
Howard is best remembered as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, mostly today
called 'Conan the Barbarian,' he also created King Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane,
a dour Puritan who smashed pagan altars with a bronze-bound Bible; Bran Mak Morn,
'El Borak,' sailor Steve Costigan, and dozens of others. He wrote in virtually
every genre with the possible exception of romance, under at least 100 different
pseudonyms, often having two stories under different pseudonyms in the same issue
of a magazine. In almost every case his stories featured thrilling high adventure
with a larger-than-life central character-which was what the public and the publishers
wanted. With the possible exception of Frederick Faust, who wrote mostly as Max
Brand, Howard may have been, from about 1925 until his death in 1936, the single
most prolific author in the pulp fiction field. |
| Personally,
Howard was a box of contradictions. He once told a friend "I don't smoke. I don't
smoke because the sorriest SOB I know of smokes, and I won't be like him. Well,
Hell-he breathes and so do I." He wrote poetry-mostly unpublished until after
his death-about his love for beautiful women, but had relationships with only
two women in his life-his mother and a girl, later a schoolteacher, named Novalyne
Price. |
L
- Novalyne Price
R - Howard in a fedora - shortly before his death. |
| By
1930, when Howard was 24, a new urgency entered his writing. The depression had
hit, his father's medical practice had gone down to virtually nothing-Dr. Howard
was required, by the Hippocratic Oath, to treat patients, but he mostly went unpaid.
In addition, Hester Howard had developed cancer-a cancer that would ultimately
kill her. Robert's writing checks became almost the family's only income. |
| A
replica of Howard's typewriter. The original is now in private hands, but the
owner has furnished documentation of the original - allowing the purchase of this
authentic replacement. |
| An
impressive income for the time it was, too. Though the maximum pay for a story
in a pulp magazine at the time was only 1½¢ per word-a 5,000 word story would
bring the author $75- -Howard's annual income was exceeded only by the salary
of the president of the local bank. In 1935, the last full year of his life and
his most productive year, Howard earned about $6,000 from his stories. He was
able to buy-and pay cash for-a brand-new 1935 Chevrolet coupé, at the time about
a $400 purchase. |
| | Docent
Era Hanky in front of a period piano. The encased bust of Cleopatra is one of
the few items actually owned by Howard. | |
|
| For
a time-only occasionally-he dated Novalyne Price. She once commented that she
thought he would have made a great warrior for Genghis Khan. He replied "I did."
Reincarnation, in which he apparently believed wholeheartedly, forms a theme in
many of his stories. He also told Miss Price "I don't write the stories, I just
copy them down from what the characters tell me." |
| | A
rather fanciful publicity poster for the movie - The Whole Wide World |
| |
| By
early 1936 Hester Howard's cancer was entering the terminal stages. Bob was writing
16 to 18 hours a day, sending dozens of stories a week to publishers. His mother,
who was still ambulatory to some extent, all but cut him off from the outside
world. When his mother entered the final coma, he asked the attending physician
if there was any hope. He was told there was not, that his mother had only hours
to live. He went upstairs, typed a bit of poetry and left it in his typewriter,
went out to his car, took a Colt .32 automatic pistol out of the glove compartment,
put it to his head just over his right ear, and pulled the trigger. He lived about
two hours. His mother died the next day. Robert E. Howard was only 30 years old. |
| Howard's
final words left in his typewriter. |
| Howard's
legacy goes far beyond Conan the Barbarian. His many, many stories-some are even
now being discovered by researchers of the pulp-magazine era, with new Howard
pseudonyms coming to light-were hastily written, but were the products of a gifted
writer. At one time it was popular, among critics of the genre, to refer to Howard's
talent as 'slapdash and derivative.' The critics, at the time, were unaware of
the conditions under which Howard wrote. As awareness of those conditions has
come to light, Howard is being recognized as a giant of literature, forced to
use his talent in a very mundane way to support his family and pay for his mother's
medical treatment in an economic depression of monumental proportions. The fact
that he was able to produce what he did in the time that he had to produce it
certainly makes him one of the most prolific writers in history. Had circumstances
been different-had he not had to work in the genres he did for the reasons he
had to work there--he would probably have become a novelist with the stature of
a Steinbeck or a Hemingway. | 
| Photos
of Howard (framed with actual pickets from the original fence) are available for
sale in the Robert E. Howard Museum in Cross
Plains. |
|
BOOK
The Weird Works Of Robert E. Howard ... | |
|
DVD
Conan - The Complete Quest | |
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