So yesterday’s post on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harold Lamb and the recent post on the canon, coupled with today is the anniversary of the passing of J. R. R. Tolkien and the seventh anniversary of the death of Frederik Pohl, got me to thinking. I referred to Burroughs and Lamb as giants. In the canon post I quoted Newton talking about his achievements being due to his standing on the shoulders of giants.
So who exactly are the giants in the field? Continue reading
Hester Jane Ervin Howard
I would like to thank John Bullard for his assistance in the preparation of this post.
Recently I was traveling through Carlsbad, Texas, something I’ve done many times over the years. There’s not much in Carlsbad, other than the San Angelo State Supported Living Center and some houses and churches, post office, and a few other establishments that owe their existence to the state facility. San Angelo is about fifteen to twenty minutes to the southeast.
I seemed to recall reading something about Robert E. Howard’s mother Hester having been a patient in a facility north of San Angelo, but it had been a while. Memory is a tricky thing, and I wanted to get confirmation. It happened that I was talking to John Bullard on the phone as I was passing through, so I asked him about it. He thought I was right, that Howard had mentioned such a thing in one of his letters. A few hours later he sent me the following excerpt from one of Bob’s letters. Continue reading
The Dark Man
Robert E. Howard
Lancer Paperbacks
Original Price $0.95
So earlier this month I was in the mood for some Robert E. Howard. I am always in the mood for Howard at this time of year. It has to do with Howard Days. (This was about a week before the Fort McKavett excursion.)
The local comic shop has part of a wall devoted to used paperbacks, and they usually have about a dozen or more Robert E. Howard titles. I haven’t bought many there because whatever the book, I usually either have a copy or have all the stories in other books.
But I didn’t have a copy of the The Dark Man. The book was in almost pristine conditions. For three bucks, I couldn’t pass it up. Continue reading
What follows is a guest post from John Bullard. – KW
Ambrose Bierce
Today, June 24th, is the birthday of writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce. He became famous for his reporting, his fiction writing and his satires. He disappeared while down in Mexico covering the Mexican Revolution around 1914. His work is readily available. An online site that has most of his fiction, including all of the stories mentioned in this piece, and some of his non-fiction is here:
http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html
So, why on Bierce’s birthday am I going to talk as much about Robert E. Howard as the birthday boy? Simple: Ambrose Bierce had a big influence on some of Howard’s weird western stories. Continue reading
If things had gone the way the were supposed to, instead of writing this post, I would be at Howard Days enjoying a nice dinner, listening to Roy Thomas giving his Guest of Honor speech, and wondering if I would win all my bids in the silent auction. But as you are probably aware, nothing this year has gone the way it was supposed to. Continue reading
This is the third of a three part series of guest posts by John Bullard. Before I turn the blog over to John, I would like to take a moment and thank him for all the work he has done not only researching and writing this series, but his editing of the Howard letters for the next edition of the collected letters. It’s this type of behind the scenes efforts that often go unacknowledged. So John, on behalf of Howard fans and scholars everywhere, thank you.
Click the links to read Part 1 and Part 2. Be advised there are spoilers.
Now here’s John.
In Part 2, we saw some of the historical Texans and their stories that Howard used to base incidents in his story “Beyond the Black River” on, hereinafter referred to as BBR. We also saw that Howard’s life-long love of talking to and learning these stories from old people he would meet saturated his thoughts and dreams, leading him to create other incidents and characters in the story. In this final part, we will see the one story that influenced Howard the most in writing BBR, and then his use of historical people that his ancestors interacted with from family histories which he used to flesh out his story. Finally, we’ll see his use of a famous incident in Texas history to bring BBR to an end, clearly showing that BBR was indeed a story about the settlement of Texas, and not a story taken from the American Colonial wars with the Eastern First Nations. Continue reading
What follows is a guest post by John Bullard. Take it away, John. And by the way, there are spoilers. You have been warned.
In Part One, we began to examine the historical incidents and people from Texas history that Howard used in creating his story, “Beyond the Black River”, hereinafter abbreviated as BBR, grounding the tale as a story about the settling of Texas and not about the American Colonists fighting with the Eastern First Nations. We saw that Howard was particularly interested in the history of the settlement of Comanche lands in Central and North Central Texas by Anglo settlers, and started using the long years of conflict as the foundation for his creating his Conan story of “Beyond the Black River”. He used the general geography of the Texas lands bounded by the Trinity and Brazos rivers and transposed it into the woodland setting of the story bounded by the Thunder and Black rivers. Finally, it was shown that Howard used the actual incident of the destruction of Fort Parker by the Comanche and Kiowa in 1836 as the destruction of the fictional Fort Tuscelan in “Beyond the Black River”. Now, we will look at some of the peoples and stories of Texans fighting for survival against the Comanches who were waging their own war to keep their lands. Continue reading
What follows is a guest post by John Bullard. It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.
Weird Tales, May 1935, first installment of “Beyond the Black River”
Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting. Continue reading
British author Algernon Blackwood was born on this date, March 14, in 1869. Blackwood was a major influence on many writers of the weird tale in the early years of the 20th Century, including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.
Along with “The Willows”, “The Wendigo” is one of Blackwood’s best known tales.
It concerns a group on a moose hunting expedition in the Canadian wilderness. A psychiatrist, his nephew, two guides, and a cook are having no luck on their hunt, so they decide to split up. The uncle and his guide go west, the nephew and his guide canoe across the lake they are camped by and hike some distance to another lake, and the cook stays in the base camp await their return. Continue reading
Robert E. Howard’s girlfriend, Novalyne Price Ellis, was born on this date, March 9 in 1908. She passed away on March 30, 1999.
Her memoir, One Who Walked Alone, detailing her relationship with Howard, is one of the major sources of information about Bob’s life. Howard fans and scholars owe her a debt of gratitude for writing it.
If’ you’ve never read the book, I suggest you get your hands on a copy. It’s well worth your time.
One Who Walked Alone was the basis of the film The Whole Wide World, which starred Vincent D’Onofrio and an unknown-at-the-time actress named Renee Zellweger. (It was released a few months before Jerry McGuire.) It’s a fairly faithful adaptation and worth watching.
There have been two editions of One Who Walked Alone, the second published to coincide with the film and having a picture of Zellweger on the cover. The first edition is the one shown to the left. Both editions were published by Donald M. Grant.