Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography

Winner of the 2018 Atlantean award for Outstanding Achievement, Book from the Robert E. Howard Foundation From a single, stifling room in a small sagebrush town in central Texas, hunched over a manual typewriter, Robert E. Howard created memorable characters, exotic worlds, and glorious pulp adventures. In this new biography, Howard is firmly established as an important figure in American literature. Before taking his own life at the age of 30, the precocious Howard was one of the most popular writers of the pulp magazine era of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Recognized today as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and the originator of the sword-and-sorcery genre, he was also a gifted poet and the author of now-classic horror stories, historical dramas, and comical tall tales. But the gifted and brilliant Howard saw himself as an outsider in the small Texas town where he lived with his father, a physician, and his mother, who battled ill health for much of her life. Constrained by circumstance, Howard put into his fiction the excitement of far horizons that he himself was denied. David C. Smith, himself a recognized author of fantasy and adventure fiction, here presents the unique story of a young man who defied the odds of his time and place to become a writer whose work is still enjoyed by millions. Smith shows us how Howard fulfilled his readers’ expectations for page-turning excitement while writing with poetic precision and creating archetypal characters that are now part of mainstream American popular culture.