While working on books for the Robert E. Howard Foundation, I happened to be digging through all of the typescript digital photo copies the Foundation has made from the Glenn Lord Collection. I came across many letters from various Pulp Editors and Publishers to Howard critiquing his stories or giving him advice, or saying why they rejected his submissions. Rob Roehm had published most of the correspondence from Farnsworth Wright and Otis Adelbert Kline to Howard in the wonderful The Complete Letters of Doctor Isaac M. Howard, but most of these other letters have not been published for interested folks to read. I gathered them all and have edited a booklet that may hopefully be published sometime soon. I thought a look at a few of the letters might be interesting for the insights they give into what Robert E. Howard was dealing with in his writing career.
1928: Howard and Argosy on “Solomon Kane”(“Red Shadows”)
Most Howard fans know that Howard really wanted to make it big in the pulps, and especially was hoping to get something published in Adventure, or the prestigious King of all of the pulps, Argosy. While he never made it into print in Adventure, he did crack Argosy’s roster back in 1929 with “Crowd Horror”, but didn’t return to its pages until after his death in 1936. Some fans may know that Howard originally submitted his first Solomon Kane story, “Solomon Kane” to Argosy, where it was rejected. Howard then sent it in to Farnsworth Wright, who accepted it and changed the title to “Red Shadows”, and it was published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales.
It was fascinating to see the rejection letter Howard received from one of the associate editors of Argosy, S.A. McWilliams, who took the time to handwrite the four page(!) rejection letter to Howard telling Howard why the story was rejected and advice to the young writer. Here is the letter: (Feb. 20, 1928)
Dear Mr. Howard,
In some ways this story is very good, and in others it is rotten. I think you may have the stuff if you get steered right, & for that reason am going to hand out the why & wherefore, in detail, that the story was turned down.
It starts out as a period story, & finally changes into a combination modern & medieval African Jungle story. You can’t mix periods & atmospheres like that. Stick to one or the other. Your story is disconnected, partly because of that same wandering from one period to another.
There is too much that is unfinished or unexplained and too much that is miraculous. For instance, it would seem rather incredible to a reader that the Wolf would not return thru the secret passage of the cave and attempt to recover part of his loot. Then, there is absolutely no connection between the first & second parts. In one jump you change from the middle ages to Eugene O’Neil jungle stuffs with no explanation save a vague intimation that there has been some kind of a pursuit. If there has been such a chase or hunt, you can’t omit it from your story.
The stuff pulled by the shaman is good, but you can’t let it go as an unexplained miracle. Unexplained miracles are easy to write, but the reader soon tires of them. What the readers want, and, incidentally, is hard to write is miracle stuff which can be explained to them by one means or another. One thing more – as a general rule conversation and descriptive matter should not be included in the same paragraph.
You seem to have caught the knack of writing good action & plenty of it into your stories. If you guard against the faults I have outlined, I believe your stuff will be saleable and will be interested in seeing some of it. Good luck.
/s/S.A. McWilliams
(Associate Editor)(over)
P.S. I owe you an apology for not returning your ms. sooner. I wanted to send a personal letter with it, however, & was not able to get time to write it before, owing to the unusually large number of stories we are receiving just now – about 100 per day. As a consequence this ms. of yours has been lying here on my desk untouched for the last two weeks. I hope you will pardon the delay.
/s/ S.A.M.
As there are no surviving typescripts of the story in either drafts or final form, we don’t know what if anything Howard may have changed after he received this critique from McWilliams. Obviously, McWilliams didn’t understand what Howard was trying to write, but McWilliams definitely pointed out what he liked in Howard’s story, what Howard has become known for: “… [G]ood action & plenty of it …”. I find it fascinating that McWilliams so liked Howard’s style that he took the time to write a handwritten, four page rejection letter explaining his rejection and giving what were generally accepted story style points to Howard to help make Howard’s work more acceptable to the editors of the pulps at that time.
1931: Howard and Strange Tales on “People of the Dark”
No doubt not liking the low and slow pay that he didn’t receive until after publication from Weird Tales, Howard started sending some of his stories to the Clayton Group’s new start-up pulp, Strange Tales. He established a good relationship with the editor, Harry Bates. Here’s a letter from Bates to Howard on the story, “The People of the Dark”, dated October 29, 1931:
Dear Mr. Howard:
The originality of your story, “The People of the Dark,” appeals to me. I liked it better than anything of yours I have yet seen. But I feel it will be much improved if altered. Being a short story, it should not be told in chapters. Asterisks may mark important breaks.
The chief fault that I found in the story was that there was too much fighting and chasing and maneuvering within the body of the story – say, from around page 7 to page 18. I feel that this could be cut by one-third; possible, in skillful hands, by one-half. Too much of this fighting, physical action spoils the rounded reincarnation effect which is the chief merit of the piece. And such prolonged bloody physical action does not go well in a weird story, anyway. I am not suggesting that you change the quality and nature of the conflict in the body of the story, but only its length.
How about it? If you care to cut this yarn I will be glad to see it again. I cannot promise you now that it will be bought, for Mr. Clayton reads and decides on all stories with me. However, we usually agree pretty closely.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Bates, Editor
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
ASTOUNDING STORIES
STRANGE TALES
Howard appears to have followed some of Bates’ suggestions. We currently have two drafts of “People of the Dark”, and the second one appears to be the typescript Howard had sent in to Bates, as it has the chapter headings, while the published form in the Del Rey The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard only has spaces between paragraphs instead of the chapter breaks. The main difference between the second draft and the published story is much rewriting of the published story from the second draft, with a big action piece to end the story, instead of the weak, let the lovers have their happiness ending of the second draft. I happen to feel that Howard could have followed Bates’ advice to trim the “fighting and chasing” some more than what he did.
1933: Howard and Astounding on “The Valley of the Lost”
Howard had submitted “The Valley of the Lost” to the great Science Fiction pulp, Astounding in 1933. He wrote about it in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: “Glad you made the Astounding Story market. I’ve sent them a yarn, but haven’t heard from it. Afraid they won’t take it, but I intend to keep trying.”(Smith, ca. Oct. 1933)
Unfortunately for Howard, Street and Smith had just bought Astounding, and with the new editors had instituted the policy that the stories in a “Science” Fiction magazine had to have some science in them. Howard, in a letter to August Derleth, wrote about his story being rejected by the editorial staff at Astounding:
Yes, Astounding went pseudo-scientific. The editor returned my weird yarn, requesting me to submit some scientific fiction, but whether I’ll be able to make the market or not is doubtful. It is an entirely new field for me, and though I seem to be fairly versatile in a small way, having written and sold weirds, historicals, sports, detectives, and adventures, there is so little of the scientist about my nature that I feel no confidence in my ability to write convincingly on the subject. Frankly, it seems to me that the average pseudo-scientific tale (always excepting the really fine work of such men as Wandrei, Williamson, Keller and a few others) is pretty poor stuff, below the average level of the weird, detective or adventure yarn. I attribute this partly to the necessity of bending plot, action, and atmosphere to fit some scientific or mock-scientific theory or formula, and partly to the fact that readers of this type of fiction seem to demand the same plots over and over again, and to resent the slightest variation. I may be wrong, but this is the conclusion I have reached from reading the published letters of pseudo-scientific fans. All readers of the wood-pulps are more or less inclined that way (or I should say most, instead of all) but the p.s.f. [pseudo-scientific fiction] seem unusually conventional. A queer paradox.(Derleth, ca. Dec. 1933)
However, when you read the actual rejection letter Howard received from one of the associate editors at Astounding, dated Nov. 16, 1933, you see a slightly different tone from what Howard related to Derleth:
Dear Mr. Howard:
Unfortunately for your story, enclosed, the policy of ASTOUNDING forbids us now to accept any stories of the weird type, although in the first few issues we did publish some. However, we find it difficult to obtain satisfactory pseudoscientific shorts, and would very much like to see some from you. With us, originality of idea comes first, and a convincing scientific basis; otherwise, no restrictions on the stories – we don’t insist on the black and white pulp magazine plot.
I hope you will submit something in the near future. The market is wide open.
Cordially,
/s/ Desmond Hall
Associate EditorEnc.: “The Valley of the Lost
What caught my attention is that line by Hall: “… we find it difficult to obtain satisfactory pseudoscientific shorts, and would very much like to see some from you.”(emphasis mine) Clearly, you can see that Hall liked Howard’s story very much, and was practically begging for Howard to submit a story with any science in it to justify taking it. Further, Hall explicitly rejects Howard’s statement in his letter to Derleth that “readers of this type of fiction seem to demand the same plots over and over again, and to resent the slightest variation.” Why Howard didn’t take the hint and try writing some more “pseudo-scientific fiction” is unknown. He certainly tried his best to break in to the hardboiled detective/mystery pulps for a couple of years. Howard says in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft, ca. Jan. 1934) that his grades in science while in school were “were infinitely higher than my English and literature grades”, but he wasn’t interested in science. However, he did write several stories that most likely would have been accepted by Astounding that had some science or pseudoscience in them, but I guess he felt that his time was better spent working on his existing lucrative characters Conan, Costigan and Breckenridge Elkins and El Borak.
Conclusion
While most of the editors’ letters to Howard are fairly short with quick reasons for the rejections, (Leo Margulies was particularly succinct and brusque in his rejections), some have the editor making suggestions on rewriting or reworking the story to meet what they thought would make it better as in the Bates letter above. Many of the rejections have the editor asking for more submissions from Howard, so, they definitely liked his work. I wish Howard had kept more of his letters from the editors to see what influence they had on many of his works. We have multiple drafts on many of his stories, and if we had those letters, we could see if the differences in some of the drafts and the also the published version may have been due to Howard responding to the editors’ critiques.
Sources
Letters
Howard to Clark Ashton Smith, ca. Oct. 1933
Howard to August Derleth, ca. Dec. 1933
Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. Jan. 1934
S.A. McWilliams to Howard, Feb. 20, 1928
Harry Bates to Howard, Oct. 29, 1931
Desmond Hall to Howard, Nov. 16, 1933
Books
Howard, Robert E. (2008). The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. Del Rey.
Roehm, R. and Bullard, John. (Eds.) (2022). The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Vol. Three: 1933-1936, REHFP.
John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has updated The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which will soon be available for purchase. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this post and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles. John is currently working on several projects for The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.