Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard, Still Influential at 109

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reh1Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Howard.  For someone who wrote for the pulps, which were considered by many to be barely above subliterate trash during their heyday, he’s got a remarkable legacy.

His books are still being reprinted, with new ones coming out on a regular basis.  Howard has been the subject of multiple biographies.  A foundation has been formed in his name that gives a scholarship to a graduating senior each year.  His work has been adapted to film.  (Okay, not necessarily adapted well or faithfully, but it at least has been adapted.)  He wrote some of the seminal works in the field of sword and sorcery, works that have been widely imitated for decades.  And his collected letters reveal a young man whose mind and imagination were too big for the narrow confines of his small Texas town.

How many best-sellers from his era can you name beyond the obvious ones of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Parker, and Hemingway?  How many works of “serious literature” that bravely explore “the human condition” and promote social justice from as little as ten years ago, never mind two or three decades back, are still in print or even remembered?Swords-sm

Howard wrote with a passion, but then there weren’t many things Howard didn’t approach passionately, at least things he chose rather than had thrust on him, such as nonwriting jobs.  His ideas and passions came through in his writing.  That’s part of what makes so much of his work, whether fiction or poetry or correspondence, both fun and deep.  Too many of today’s crusaders for [insert cause du jour here] need to take some time and study Howard’s works and see how it’s done.  Howard communicates things like his views on barbarism, civilization, honor, loyalty, etc., clearly and unambiguously without ever interfering with his narrative or throwing the reader out of his story.  Would that we had more like him writing today.

So take a moment today and remember him.  Raise a glass in his honor.  Spend some time in one of his worlds.  With snow overnight and more expected for the rest of the day, I’ll read some more in Swords of the North myself.  It’s a fitting day to immerse myself in that Northern thing.

Howard Andrew Jones has posted a solid tribute here.

Arriving in Today’s Mail

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20150120_203602The index and addenda to The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard arrived today.  It probably won’t be of much interest to the casual reader, but it’s a highly useful tool to the serious (and not so serious) scholar.  In addition to the much needed index, the book also contains 17 letters and drafts that were not known at the time the Collected Letters was published.

Pricing and ordering information are here.  Of course, members of the Robert E. Howard Foundation get a discount.

Kudos to Bobby Derie for putting the index together.  It was a lot of work.

Clark Ashton Smith Turns 122

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ClarkAshtonSmithToday marks the 122nd anniversary of Clark Ashton Smith’s birth.  He was one of the Big Three of Weird Tales, the other two being H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (but then I probably don’t need to tell you that).

Like Howard, Smith was also a poet as well as a fiction writer.  (Yes, Robert E. Howard wrote poetry, some of the best I’ve ever read.)  Unlike Howard, Smith’s fiction has a complexity to it Howard’s lacked, especially in word choice.  Isaac Asimov went on record complaining that he didn’t like reading Smith because he had to keep looking words up in the dictionary.  (You see, kids, in the dark days before computers we had these things called dictionaries and when you didn’t know a word, you went to the dictionary and…ah, never mind.)  And if Asimov had to look it up, then you know it probably wasn’t on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

smithPortrait01In spite of the work involved at times, Smith is still very much a writer worth reading.  I’ll be tackling at least one of his collections later this year for the posts I’m doing at Black Gate on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.  There were four now highly collectible volumes of Smith’s work published as part of the BAF series.  In fact the very first BAF book I ever owned was Smith’s Hyperborea.  I’ve only dipped into Smith’s works a little, but he was a writer of wild imagination.  We could use more like him today.

Look What I Got in the Mail Today

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20141210_131341My reading plans for the evening have just been changed.

If you’re jealous, you can do something about that here.  My copy was 168 of 200.  I don’t know if the Foundation is shipping high number or low numbers first.

But like I said, my reading plans have just changed.

Robert E. Howard’s Swords of the North Available for Preorder

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Swords-smThe Robert E. Howard Foundation announced last week that their next book, Swords of the North, is available for preorder.  I’ve ordered my copy.  Is that not a great cover?  The book ships in December, so it would make an excellent Christmas gift for the REH fan in your life, even if that fan is yourself.  Maybe especially if that fan is yourself.

Here’s what the announcement, lifted from the REH Foundation page:

There is a clear self-consistency among all of Howard’s tales which will readily demonstrate that underlying it all is a coherent vision of a fictional history of the world and mankind, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s term a “secondary” world, internally consistent, full of strangeness and wonder, “free from the domination of observed fact,” yet quite credible, a world rooted in the familiar if populated with the unfamiliar, a world that combines the ordinary with the extraordinary. Just as Tolkien’s “Arda” is our Earth, so too is Howard’s world.

-from Rusty Burke’s introduction

The REH Foundation Press is proud to present Swords of the North, a collection of Robert E. Howard’s Celtic/Viking adventure stories. The book checks in at 540 pages, and will be printed in hardback with dust jacket, in a limited first-print quantity of 200 copies, each individually numbered. Cover art by Aaron Miller and introduction by Rusty Burke. This volume marks the first publication of the fragment that begins with, “Between berserk battle rages,” which features Cormac Mac Art’s partner, Wulfhere Skull-splitter. It also collects for the first time in one volume all of the James Allison stories and fragments, both incomplete drafts of “The Temple of Abomination,” and other rarities. The book is expected to ship in December 2014. Pre-order yours today.

Prices

Swords of the North is $45 for REHF Members, $50 for non-members (all prices in US dollars) plus shipping. (How to become a member? Look here.)

Shipping prices and additional details (such as the contents) can be found at the REH Foundation website.

The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: “The Children of the Night”

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Howard HorrorThe Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paper $18.00
ebook Kindle $11.59 Nook $13.99

I read this story for the first time recently in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy collection The Spawn of Cthulhu.  (The subject of my next BAF post for Black Gate.)  Just from the title, I could have sworn I’d read it before, but I think I would have remembered this one.

“The Children of the Night” was first published in Weird Tales in the April-May issue of 1931.  It’s an interesting little story in that it ties two of Howard’s series characters in with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Continue reading →

Robert E. Howard in Lincoln County

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In June of 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson took a road trip through New Mexico, and on the way stopped in the town of Lincoln.  Howard was fascinated by the Lincoln County War.  It’s easy to understand why.  It was a horrible, senseless conflict fueled by greed and pride from which no one came out looking good.

A friend and I took a similar trip this past June.  We’d been talking about this trip for over a year.  Family considerations required him to move back to Kansas, so we knew we had to go or the trip would never happen.  We managed to find a couple of days when we could both get free and headed west.

After hiking in the mountains we made our way to Lincoln, where we stayed the night at the Wortley Hotel (Where No Guest Has Been Gunned Down in Over 100 Years).  The next morning, we toured the town before heading home.

Howard described his impressions of Lincoln in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft in a letter circa July 1935.  My intention of this post is to comment on some of the things Howard wrote about, supplemented with my own photos from the trip.  I didn’t know much about the Lincoln County War before we went, but I’ve learned a lot since then.  (I hadn’t read that portion of Howard’s correspondence at the time.) Had I known more, I would taken some additional pictures.

REH in LincolnWhile it’s not the most famous picture of Howard, the photo on the left has been fairly widely disseminated.  It was taken in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse.  Click to enlarge the image.  The sign says “The house from which Billy the Kid made his fast escape after killing his two guards Bell and Ollinger before ? 1881 being later killed by Sherriff Pat Garrett. Visitors Welcome.”

I’m not sure who the person on the left is.  It could be Vinson, but I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that it’s one of the locals.  I just can’t remember where I read it.  If I really did.

If that is one of the locals, it would most likely be Ramon Maes, who was the grandson of Lucio Montoya, one of the participants on the Murphy-Dolan side of the conflict.  (Billy the Kid fought for the McSween-Tunstall faction.)  Maes regaled the Texans with tales of the fighting and gave them the key to the building.  At one time it was the Murphy-Dolan store and bank, and after the Lincoln County War ended, it became the courthouse and jail.  When Howard was there, it was a storage building. Continue reading →

Recent Acquisitions

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There are a few used book stores here in town.  Two are pretty good, one is so-so, and I’m not sure the fourth isn’t a front for something else.

Anyway, the one I consider the best is closing.  The owner doesn’t have a lease but owns the storefront.  As a result, he’s not in any hurry to shut his doors.  This is good, because he’s got a pretty thorough inventory.  It’s one of the great second hand stores where there are stacks of books in all the aisles, and a few minutes to see if a particular title is to be had turns into the better part of an afternoon.

Acquisitions 1I passed through the other day and picked up a few things.  At the moment everything is half off.  That percentage will increase as times goes on and the day the store shuts its doors for good draws nigh.  You know I’ll be going back. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard

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220px-Robert_E_Howard_suitToday is the birthday of one of my literary heroes, and one of only a handful of authors who has his own shelf in my library.  In fact, he’s the only one who has two full shelves devoted to his works.  I’m talking of course about Robert E. Howard.  You may think there’s not much still to be learned about Howard.  If you read the Two Gun Raconteur blog (and if you don’t, shame on you), then you know productive research into Howard’s life is still going on.

I said in my reading goals post a few weeks ago that I want to read more Howard this year.  His birthday is a perfect time to start.