Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, on January 22, 1906, the son of a country doctor. By eight he’d lived in at least seven Texas towns. The family landed in the Cross Plains area in 1919, and he stayed there for the rest of his life in a small oil-boom town in the middle of the state, writing for magazines published in Chicago and New York.
He’s one of my favorite fantasy writers. He sits on that list next to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett and Roger Zelazny, and he earned the spot with ten years of work done fast, for money, under conditions most writers would call impossible.
He sold to Weird Tales at eighteen and kept selling until his death at thirty. In between he invented Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn, wrote boxing comedies and western tall tales, and traded long letters with H.P. Lovecraft. During the Depression he earned more than anyone else in Cross Plains.
How did Robert E. Howard become a professional writer at eighteen?
He started early and he didn’t quit. He submitted his first story at fifteen, and two of his stories won prizes and ran in the school paper at Brownwood High School.
His first professional sale came at eighteen. “Spear and Fang,” a caveman story, went to Weird Tales for $16. The magazine paid on publication instead of acceptance, so a writer could sell a story in one season and wait a long time for the check. Howard lived with that arrangement his entire career, and it shaped how much he had to write just to keep cash coming in. When he died, Weird Tales still owed him somewhere between $800 and $1,300.
He tried other work in between. He wrote an oil-news column for the Cross Plains Review for $5 and took jobs around town. None of it stuck. By 1928 Weird Tales printed four of his stories and five poems in a single year, and from then until his death his work appeared in nearly three of every four issues.
A new writer ought to study that stretch closely. He didn’t wait for a big break. He wrote for the market in front of him, at the rate it paid, and learned the craft in public, one magazine issue at a time.
Why did Robert E. Howard write in so many genres?
Because the pulps paid by the word and no single magazine could keep him fed.
In 1929 he started writing boxing stories, and Sailor Steve Costigan, a brawling merchant seaman, debuted in Fight Stories that July. Costigan stories are comedies, narrated by a man who’s dumber than he thinks and tougher than anybody else in the room. In 1934 Howard launched Breckinridge Elkins in Action Stories, a hillbilly giant from Bear Creek, Nevada, and the character appeared in every issue for more than two years. He also wrote historical adventures set in the Crusades and the Middle East, plus a gunfighter in Afghanistan called El Borak.
The range shows in the fantasy.
Every genre he sold in left a mark on Conan. Conan fights like a boxer, and Howard knew how a punch lands because he’d written a shelf of fight stories. The westerns gave him a sense of the frontier as a place where law runs thin. The historical tales taught him how to stage a battle.
Most fantasy writers today come to the genre from other fantasy. Howard came to it from everywhere else, and his best stories borrow from all of it.
How did Robert E. Howard create Conan?
He did it by recycling a failure, and the story behind it is the best argument I know for keeping rejected manuscripts.
Kull, a barbarian who becomes king of Valusia, had debuted in Weird Tales in August 1929 with “The Shadow Kingdom.” The magazine paid $100 for it, the largest check Howard had seen at that point. A later Kull story about a king fighting off assassins in his own palace came back rejected. Howard took that manuscript, replaced Kull with a new barbarian from a cold northern country called Cimmeria, and retitled it “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Editor Farnsworth Wright asked for some polishing, then ran it in the December 1932 issue.
“The Scarlet Citadel” followed a month later. Weird Tales turned down another early Conan story, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” and it saw print elsewhere under a different title.
Howard wrote twenty-one Conan stories in all. Seventeen were published before he died. The last stretch includes his only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon, serialized from December 1935 to April 1936, and “Red Nails,” which ran from July to October 1936, after his death.
The lesson in the origin is blunt. A rejected story is raw material. Howard didn’t argue with the editor or bury the manuscript. He changed the one element that wasn’t working and sold the result, and the character he swapped in outlived every other thing he wrote.
What did the Hyborian Age essay do for Robert E. Howard?
It gave him a world he could move around in without contradicting himself.
Around the time Conan started selling, Howard wrote an essay of about 8,000 words called “The Hyborian Age.” It’s a fake history covering thousands of years. It runs from the fall of Kull’s world through the rise of the Hyborian kingdoms to the barbarian invasions that end them. Nations form, migrate, conquer, rot and collapse. He wrote it for his own use, as a reference, and he used it to plot “The Tower of the Elephant,” the first Conan story set fully inside that world.
So Conan’s world feels older than its stories. Aquilonia, Zamora, Stygia and the rest come with invented centuries behind them. When Conan walks into a city, the city has a past, and Howard knew what it was even when the reader didn’t.
The order of operations Howard used holds up. History first, then geography, then the hero. A writer who invents a map and drops a character on it gets a board game. A writer who knows which empire fell and why gets a world where every ruin means something.
Howard wrote an 8,000-word history of a world that never existed, then let a barbarian walk through its ruins. Write the history first.Share on X
It also kept him fast. With the history settled, Howard could write a new Conan story set anywhere in a forty-year career and know what the politics looked like in that corner of the map. The stories jump around Conan’s life out of order, as thief, pirate, mercenary and king, and they hold together because the world underneath them doesn’t move.
What did Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft argue about by mail?
They argued about civilization, mostly, and whether it was worth having.
The correspondence started in August 1930. Howard wrote to Farnsworth Wright praising Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” Wright forwarded the letter, and Lovecraft wrote back. They kept at it for six years. Lovecraft, in Providence, defended settled culture, art, tradition and order. Howard, in a Texas oil town, defended the frontier and the barbarian, and he wrote that his passion for freedom was “almost an obsession.”
The argument runs straight through the Conan stories. Over and over, civilized men in them are decadent, treacherous and soft, and the barbarian is the only honest person in the room. Howard believed civilization was a temporary condition and that barbarism always wins in the end. The Hyborian Age essay is that belief written out as history.
Lovecraft said Howard himself was present in every story he wrote. That’s accurate. Howard wasn’t a stylist hiding behind a narrator. The stories carry his convictions, his temper and his fear of being trapped, and that’s a large part of why they still hit hard.
For the other side of the exchange, see H.P. Lovecraft Day. Two men who never met spent six years shaping each other’s fiction through the mail.
What does Robert E. Howard’s prose teach a fantasy writer?
Above all it teaches speed, and the discipline that makes speed readable.
Howard’s sentences move. He loads them with strong verbs and physical detail, keeps the adjectives working, and gets to the fight. Conan doesn’t brood for pages. He sees the threat, sizes it up and acts, and the prose acts with him. Read a battle scene in “Beyond the Black River” or “Red Nails” and notice how few lines go by before somebody’s bleeding.
He also knew when to slow down. The openings of the best Conan stories set mood with long, heavy sentences about ancient stone and bad air, then the violence arrives in short bursts. That rhythm, dread followed by action, is horror technique applied to adventure, and he learned it writing for a horror magazine.
I open almost all my novels with action and fill in the backstory later, and Howard did the same thing in story after story. Conan walks into the first page already in trouble. The reader learns who he is by watching what he does about it. That’s a better introduction to a character than any amount of description, and fantasy writers who start with a prologue about the gods would do well to study it.
The site’s guide to writing fantasy fiction covers more of the craft side.
What doesn’t hold up in Robert E. Howard?
The racial attitudes, for a start. Some of the stories carry the prejudices of a 1930s Texas pulp writer, with nonwhite characters drawn as savage or menacing in ways that read badly now. It’s a real flaw in real stories, and readers coming to Howard fresh should know it’s there.
The women are uneven. Valeria in “Red Nails” and Bêlit in “Queen of the Black Coast” are fighters with their own wills. Others exist to be rescued or ogled on the cover. Howard was writing to a market that sold covers, and it shows.
Repetition is the third problem. Read ten Conan stories in a row and the structure starts to show: arrival, intrigue, a monster in the dark, a fight, an exit. Howard wrote fast for money, and some stories are the template filled in on deadline. The great ones break the pattern. The weaker ones don’t.
Read him anyway, and read the best of him first.
None of that cancels the best work. It does mean the best way to read him is selectively, starting with the strongest stories.
Why should readers find the restored Robert E. Howard texts?
Because for decades the most widely read Conan wasn’t entirely Howard’s.
After his death, L. Sprague de Camp took charge of the Conan material. When Lancer Books reissued the series as paperbacks beginning in 1966, de Camp and Lin Carter edited Howard’s texts, completed his fragments, rewrote unrelated Howard adventure stories into Conan tales and added new stories of their own. Frank Frazetta painted eight of the twelve covers, and those paintings fixed the image of Conan for a generation. The books sold enormously.
The trouble is that the pastiche crowded out the original. Readers who grew up on the Lancer set got a Conan with a timeline and a biography Howard never wrote, padded with stories by other hands. Purists pushed back, and restored editions of Howard’s own texts eventually appeared. Those are the books to buy. The difference is noticeable. Howard’s Conan is moodier, smarter and stranger than the version stitched together after him.
The 1982 film drew on the de Camp and Carter material and added a lot of its own. I reviewed Conan the Barbarian (1982) separately. The film is its own animal, and I judge it on its own terms.
What happened to Robert E. Howard in 1936?
His mother was dying, and he’d organized his life around her care for years.
Hester Howard had been sick for most of her son’s life, and the cost of her treatment ate the money he earned from the pulps. In 1934 a schoolteacher named Novalyne Price moved to Cross Plains, and she and Howard had an on-and-off relationship. Marriage came up and never happened. She left in the spring of 1936 for graduate school at Louisiana State.
On the morning of June 11, 1936, Howard learned his mother had fallen into a coma she wouldn’t wake from. He walked out to his car and shot himself. He lived about eight hours. She died the next day. Mother and son were buried together after a double funeral in Brownwood on June 14. He was thirty.
Novalyne Price later published a memoir drawn from her daily journal, One Who Walked Alone. It became the 1996 film The Whole Wide World, with Vincent D’Onofrio as Howard and Renée Zellweger as Price. It’s the closest look anybody has at the man outside his letters.
Some of his best work came in his last two years. “Red Nails” was still running in Weird Tales after he was gone.
How should you mark Robert E. Howard Day?
Read the restored Conan stories, starting with “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.” Then read “The Hyborian Age” essay and watch how much of the world you already knew came from that one document.
Read a Solomon Kane story too, and a Costigan comedy. Nobody else in the pulps covered that much ground that well.
If you write fantasy, try his method. Before you write the next scene, write two pages of history for the place it happens in: who built it, who conquered it, and what’s left over. Then send your character in with a problem and let the history push back.
Howard got ten years, and he spent them writing at a pace that would flatten most professionals today, in a town of a few thousand people, for magazines that paid late. The work outlasted every editor who shortchanged him. For more birthdays across the field, see the literature-related holidays calendar, and if you’re building a world of your own and want a second pair of eyes on it, my book coaching service is where I do that work.