Great Yet Affordable Writers: Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard was an affordable writer, but unless you're a fan of old pulp fiction you may not have heard of him. You've probably heard of his most famous creation, though- Conan the Barbarian, the Noble Savage of Noble Savages. Most people associate Conan with a certain former governor of California, or (if they're really young) with that other guy in the recent 3-D Conan movie. But Howard's Conan was really nothing like Arnold. For one thing, he wouldn't have talked with an Austrian accent- Cimmerians were supposed to be proto-Celts, distant ancestors of the Irish.

The big difference between the Arnold movie and the original Conan stories is that the original stories are really dark. Robert E. Howard was not a happy man, and his fiction portrayed a grim world in which larger-than-life characters waged a constant and desperate struggle for survival against overwhelming odds. This is a struggle that Howard himself eventually lost, taking his own life after his mother died- an action that becomes more understandable when viewed in the context of his completely isolated life in Cross Plains, Texas, surrounded by people who thought he was weird just for reading books, never mind writing them.

 

Howard was able to make a living for a little while as a writer for the pulps, and he was also pen-pals with some of the other great writers of that era- H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. But as many letters as he exchanged with them, he had no one to talk to in his daily life, and in the end he just couldn't stand it anymore. If he could have known that people would still remember Conan several decades after his death, I'm sure he would be profoundly surprised- and possibly comforted.