Robert E. Howard

By the way, I recently took the liberty of using your mythical “Arkham” in a single-stanza rhyme which Mr. Wright accepted for Weird Tales, and which fell far short of doing justice to it’s subject. Here it is: Arkham. Drowsy and dull with age the houses blink On aimless streets the rat-gnawed years forget— But…

He had thought of the South as a sunny, lazy land washed by soft breezes laden with spice and warm blossoms, where life ran tranquilly to the rhythm of black folk singing in sun-bathed cottonfields. But now he had discovered another, unsuspected side – a dark, brooding, fear-haunted side… — “Pigeons from Hell,” The Horror…

The wings of Melek Taus hover over the world, the winds whisper of revolt, anarchy, war and red ruin for all the sons of men. (CL2.116) The Yazidis (also given as Yezidis, and Yezidees) are a largely Kurdish people in the Middle East, whose religion reveres Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel; similarities with Abrahamic tales…

The unique Robert E. Howard tried his hand at quite a few fiction genres, from detective stories to oriental adventure to his humorous westerns about Breck Elkins. He virtually invented heroic fantasy featuring mighty roughneck barbarians, of course, as exemplified by Conan.  His historical adventures with the characters Turlogh Dubh O’Brien and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (that…

In my previous posts (here and here), there were several unanswered questions. Now, thanks to a few city directories, I can fill in some of the blanks regarding Robert E. Howard’s cousin, Earl Lee Comer. As we have seen, Comer received training as a draftsman for part of his World War I enlistment. Following his…

The Dustin Soldano v. Howard O’Daniels case models the common dispute between negligence and a party’s responsibility in an event. Likewise, chapter 1 of the Legal Environment textbook features Kuehn v. Pub Zone, a case that demonstrates a different scenario but the same battle of negligence and liability. The commonalities between the two cases support…

My soul’s a flame of divine fire, a god’s voice . . . –Robert E. Howard The poem “Cimmeria” is usually placed (by the relatively few critics who have considered Robert E. Howard’s poetry and poetics at all) among Howard’s most important published poems. Admirers and literary critics who have considered chiefly his fiction also…

Another enjoyable Howard Days has come and gone, and it is safe to say that any who attended were glad they did.  The number of attendees on June 10th and 11th seemed to be a bit above average, reflecting a trend toward straining the capacity of current venues and program formats.  The panel audiences are…

In 1936, regular readers of Weird Tales must have thought Robert E. Howard was having a good year. In the first seven months, Howard had serials or stories in six issues, of which two were voted the best story in their issues, and in July he had the cover, illustrated by Margaret Brundage. Even in…

In [18]49 three brothers started for California. On the Arkansas River they split up, one went on to California where he lived the rest of his life, one went back to Georgia and one, William Benjamin Howard, went to Mississippi . . . —Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. October 1930 Those three brothers…