Tag Archives: Dark Valley Destiny

Novalyne’s Birthday

Novalyne Price Ellis was born on this day (March 9) in 1908.  She passed away in 1999 on March 30.  Novalyne was the author of One Who Walked Alone, a memoir of her relationship with Robert E. Howard during the last two years of his life.  It was based on her diary.

Novalyne Price moved to Cross Plains to teach English in 1934,  She soon met Robert E. Howard, and a tempestuous relationship started.  They had broken up by the summer of 1936, and Novalyne had left Cross Plains to attend graduate school in Louisiana.  She was there when she got the news of Robert’s death.

She wrote One Who Walked Alone as a rebuttal to L. Sprague de Camp’s biography of Howard, Dark Valley Destiny.  If you’ve not read her book, you should.  It’s one of the main sources of information we have about Bob.

The book was filmed in the mid-1990s and starred Vincent D’Onofrio as Robert and Renee Zellweger as Novalyne.