Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was a classic American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, detective fiction, and poetry. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."
He is well known for having created — in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales — the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint is rivaled by only a handful of other literary characters, such as Tarzan of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.
A full century after his birth, Howard remains a seminal figure, with his best work endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to other American masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville, and Jack London.
Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, Robert's father, seems to have been possessed of a combination of wanderlust and ambition that led him to frequently move his family in search of better opportunities. By the time he was eight, Robert had lived in at least seven different and widely scattered Texas towns. In 1915, the family moved to the community of Cross Cut in Brown County, and they would live in this vicinity - with moves to Burkett (in Coleman County) in 1917 and finally to Cross Plains (Callahan County) in 1919 - for the rest of Robert’s and his mother’s lives. Hester Jane Ervin Howard, Robert’s mother, did not enjoy robust health, to put it mildly: there was a history of tuberculosis in her family and Hester Howard was sickly for much of Robert’s life. During Howard's youth his mother had a particularly strong influence on his intellectual growth. Known throughout her family as a kind and giving woman — she had selflessly spent her early years helping a variety of sick relatives, contracting tuberculosis in the process — it was she who instilled in her son a deep love of poetry and literature, filling his ears daily with recited verse, and who supported him unceasingly in his efforts to write. Howard never forgot her many kindnesses both to himself and his extended family, and her growing sickness and invalidity did much to cement his view of existence as heartless, unfair, and ultimately futile.
Robert seems to have decided upon a literary career at an early age. In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft he says that his first story was written when he was “nine or ten,†and a former postmistress at Burkett recalls that he began writing stories about this time and expressed an intention of becoming a writer. He submitted his first story for publication when he was only 15, and made his first professional sale - ‘Spear and Fang,’ a short story in which a Cro-Magnon rescues his mate from a Neanderthal - at the ripe old age of 18.
Between Conan and his other heroes Howard created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a wide swath of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy.
In 1934, a new schoolteacher arrived in Cross Plains, who would play a major role in Robert E. Howard’s life. He had met Novalyne Price a little over a year earlier after being introduced to her by their mutual friend Clyde Smith. Upon moving to Cross Plains, Novalyne made several attempts to call Howard, only to be told by his mother that he could not come to the phone or was out of town. At last, tiring of these brush-offs, she talked her cousin into giving her a ride to the Howard home, where she was greeted rather coolly by his father but somewhat more eagerly by Robert. This was the start of a sometimes affectionate, sometimes stormy relationship. For the first time there was someone locally who shared Howard’s interests - and she was a woman! However, his insistence upon personally caring for his ailing mother, whom Novalyne felt would benefit more from the services of a professional nurse, rankled at her, as did his refusal to attend social events. Marriage often entered their minds and was even occasionally discussed, but they did not entertain the same feelings at the same time. When she would think she was in love, he would insist he needed his freedom. When he thought he was ready for love, she saw only their differences. They were both passionate, fiercely independent people, which made for an intense and exciting relationship, but one that was impossible to sustain. In the spring of 1936, Novalyne was accepted into the graduate program in education at Louisiana State and left Cross Plains.
Throughout 1935 - 1936, Howard continued to be dogged by fits of increasingly unbearable melancholy and depression, and he maintained his belief in the validity of suicide as an escape from the nightmarish pain. All of his close friends had married and were immersed in their careers, Novalyne Price had left Cross Plains for graduate school, and his most reliable market, Weird Tales, had grown far behind on payments. Most importantly, his home life was falling apart — after decades of struggle, his mother was finally nearing death, and the constant interruptions of care workers at home combined with frequent trips to various sanatoriums for her care made it nearly impossible to write. Several times in 1935 – 36, whenever his mother's health precipitously threatened to give out, he made veiled allusions to his father about planning suicide. Both parents made efforts to convince him to reconsider. In June 1936, as Hester Howard slipped into her final coma, her son maintained a death vigil with his father and friends of the family, getting little sleep, drinking huge amounts of coffee, and growing more despondent — perhaps, given his exhaustion, deliriously so. This placed enormous stress upon the young writer, and he resurrected an apparently long-standing plan not to outlive his mother.
On the morning of June 11, 1936, told by a nurse that his mother would never again regain consciousness, Robert Howard got up and walked into his room, where he typed a four-line couplet on the Underwood typewriter that had served him for ten years:“All fled, all doneSo lift me on the pyre.The feast is overAnd the lamps expire.â€He then walked out of the house and got into his 1935 Chevy. The hired cook stated later that she saw him raise his hands in prayer. Was he praying or preparing the gun? She then heard a shot, and saw Robert slump over the steering wheel. She screamed. Robert’s father and Dr. Dill ran out to the car and carried his limp body back into the house. He had shot himself above the right ear, the bullet emerging on the left side of his head. Robert Howard’s robust health allowed him to survive this terrible wound for almost eight hours. He died at around 4:00 pm, Thursday, June 11, 1936, without ever regaining consciousness. His mother died the following day, also without regaining consciousness. A double funeral was held on June 14, and the mother and son were transported to Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood for burial.
Fifty years after Howard's death, Novalyne Price Ellis, upset by Howard's portrayal in de Camp's Dark Valley Destiny, wrote "One Who Walked Alone" (1986) to counteract its influence. Ten years later, the book was made into a critically acclaimed film called "The Whole Wide World", starring Renée Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio.
By the time of his death, Robert E. Howard had been spinning his tales of myth and mystery for a mere dozen years, only four of which he devoted to his most famous creation, Conan. Yet today, over 70 years after his death, the adventures of the Hyborian hero and much of Howard’s other work endures. Unlike many of his contemporaries writing for the pulps, Howard’s fertile imagination and powerhouse storytelling gains him new fans in each successive generation. His work has inspired countless imitations and has been translated not only into many other languages, but into other media as well - comics, movies, television. In their wake have followed fan clubs and publications, an amateur press association founded in 1972 and still going strong, and now a growing presence on the World Wide Web. Truly, Robert E. Howard, like Conan, is one for the ages.Howard Days
Howard's hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, has restored his home and converted it into a museum that has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Cross Plains celebrates Robert E. Howard Days annually on the second weekend in June, hosted by a local civic organization known as Project Pride. This mini-convention attracts over a hundred fans yearly; events include tours of Howard's home and special postal cancellations, and the Cross Plains Library displays a selection of original Howard manuscripts.
