Robert E Howard: The bizarre life of the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ creator
When you picture a fantasy author, what sort of person do you picture?
Because, with the best will in the world, there are really two kinds of person to sort through, isn’t there? There’s the refined academic of yesteryear, the kind of person who uses a pocket watch and creates entire languages just for their stories in between giving lectures at Oxford. Then there’s… well, the kind of person who reads fantasy books in the modern day. Make of that what you will, I’m not one to judge.
However, fittingly enough for the world of fantasy, the truth of the matter is far beyond what I could have imagined.
The truth is that one of the architects of modern fantasy came from neither of those worlds. Instead, he came from the rough and ready life of working class Texas in the early 1900s, a time where economic desperation and societal division made for a bloodthirsty, dog eat dog world. In fact the only thing that really separated the world that Robert E Howard wrote about, and the one he lived in, were the presence of heroes that could fight back against the forces of oppression. And loincloths.
Howard was born on January 22nd, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, to Dr Isaac Mordecai Howard, a travelling country physician, and his wife, Hester Jane Ervin Howard. Due to his father’s work, Robert grew up seeing genuine, heartland Texas at its best and worst. Roving through whole towns created to capitalise on a nearby oil strike, then moving on when the money dried up. This meant that Robert grew up encircled by death, violence and physical trauma. The bloody recent history of the young state surrounds him on both sides.
His life at home wasn’t much better either. His parents’ marriage was on the verge of collapse, and only his mother saw any worth in the small, introverted Robert’s love of reading and writing. The only other thing that Robert was as passionate about as literature and poetry was boxing, which became an obsession of his for the rest of his days. When he was nine years old, though, Robert decided to commit himself to becoming a writer, and despite a tragically short life, he would follow through with that promise. Writing four hundred stories and five hundred poems over the next 19 years.
What inspired the work of Robert E Howard?
Put simply, Robert E Howard was a prodigy. Possessed of an eidetic memory where he could remember reams of verse and prose after reading them twice at the most, Robert filled his days by reading as much as he possibly could. In particular, the young writer was taken by the works of Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Bullfinch. At the age of 15, he discovered pulp magazines, easily accessible, easily digestible genre fiction that he, for one thing, loved. For another, he knew he could do the same.
Howard began churning out stories and, while he never got published at this time, it didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the work. If anything, it fuelled his desire to break out. Not only learning to write with his own voice, but also tailoring it to any market. Outside of writing, he bristled against any form of authority, especially the kind of authority that would waltz into a town booming with oil money, exploit it and take it for itself. This hatred of injustice would manifest in his stories, tales of brooding, dogged heroes fighting wars against exploitative aristocracies, not because they’ll win, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Howard’s work began to be published when he was in his late teens, and earning a fairly comfortable living as a soda jerk in a drug store. By his early 20s, he was able to leave that life behind and commit to writing short stories full-time. While dabbling in genres like horror, fantasy and even semi-autobiographical sports fiction (Howard had turned his boxing passion into a hobby in his late teens), Howard wouldn’t turn to the genre that would define him until 1927. He combined elements of Lovecraftian horror, Arthurian myth, historical romance and science fantasy into a genre that today, we’d call Sword and Sorcery.
Howard was finally a wealthy man, getting consistent work and palling around with other successful writers of the age. Unfortunately, he was a newly wealthy man at the dawn of the 1930s. After losing everything in the aftermath of the stock market crash, his next move had to be his masterpiece. What he conceived was exactly that. The character of Conan the Barbarian appeared in the magazine most of his work was published in, Weird Tales, in 1932. This captured his audiences imagination and he was able to consistently work on Conan stories for the rest of his days. Unfortunately, that’s not saying much.
You see, as good as Howard’s professional life was getting, his home life was falling apart. The only person who stayed close to Howard was his mother, who lived with him his whole life. By the mid-1930s, her health had rapidly declined due to a battle with tuberculosis. In June 1936, she slipped into a coma. Upon being told that she wouldn’t wake up from it, Robert E Howard retreated to his car and shot himself in the head. He died eight hours later.
One of the many tragedies about the life of Robert E Howard is that he died never knowing just what a phenomenal impact he would have on the world of science fiction and fantasy. One that went far beyond introducing a popular character, even one as iconic as Conan. A sign, if one was needed, that you never can tell where someone who will change the game will come from.
