America's Haunted Mythmaker: The Immortal Robert E. Howard
One hundred years ago something powerful, transcendent, and dark emerged from the rolling plains of central Texas. Monsters and myths sprang into the world, immortalizing their conjurer, a young writer named Robert E. Howard. He still beckons readers with his promise of adventure and hooks them with the darkness underneath.
Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn, El Borak, and Conan the Cimmerian were born in the oilfields around Cross Plains, Texas. These mythic heroes found life through Howard, who rose above the churning legion of pulp magazine writers of the age to become a myth himself.
Growing up in boomtowns, Howard sought to escape the agriculture and oilfield industries that surrounded him. Ironically, he could never bring himself to leave home – he lived with his parents his entire life and almost never left Texas. But his typewriter summoned enthralling tales of faraway lands and times.
As his stories found publication in the late 1920s, Howard began earning his living from writing and never looked back. Practicing an outcast profession in his environment, he felt a sharp sense of separation, whether real or imagined, from his community. Determined to dispel any accusations of inferiority, Two-Gun Bob maintained an extensive workout regimen and fought in a local icehouse boxing club. The kinesthetic knowledge gained from those pursuits bled into his writing, adding power and realism to fantasy.
Many of his tales read like what they are: pulp fiction produced at speed and volume for a slender paycheck. But Howard tapped into something deeper, and darker, that resonated with readers. Almost a century later, he continues to find new fans.
The theme of decadent civilizations falling to the barbarous nature of humanity pervades his work. In one letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Howard wrote “When I begin a tale of old times, I always find myself instinctively arrayed on the side of the barbarian, against the powers of organized civilization.”
Conan the Usurper, Frank Frazetta, from REH World
This fatalistic pessimism stemmed in part from the land he lived in. “I have spent most of my life in the hard, barren semi-waste lands of Western Texas…” he wrote to the editor of Weird Tales. Howard harbored the conflicted feelings held by many plains-dwellers and was never able to leave the land behind. He often used the landscape of his region for inspiration: Conan’s Cimmeria emerged from a wintry vision of the Hill Country above Fredericksburg, Texas.
Though he became famous for the stories set in ancient, mist-shrouded, fantastical lands, the final story Howard worked on took place on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. Unfinished before his early death, Nekht Semerkeht told the tale of a conquistador lost in that eeire, desolate land during Coronado’s expedition in 1541.
When only thirty years old, Howard killed himself as his mother lay dying in a coma. A line from one of his many poems, Always Comes Evening, reads “For my road runs out in thistles and my dreams have turned to dust.” But his stories lived on. And on. His characters outlived him and took on lives of their own. And the man who summoned them from the mist became legend.
Through skill, work, luck, and fate, Robert E. Howard tapped into something visceral and timeless. It made him, and his characters, immortal. To paraphrase one of his biographers: Come to Howard for the action, adventure, and thrills; stay for the darkness just beneath the surface.
