Robert E. Howard Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Robert Ervin Howard was born January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, to Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, a country physician, and Hester Jane Ervin Howard. Almost immediately his life took on the itinerant rhythm of frontier medicine and boomtown Texas. The family moved through a chain of small communities before settling in Cross Plains in Callahan County in 1919, a place shaped by droughts, cotton cycles, and the sudden violence of oil money. Howard absorbed the talk of roughnecks, ranchers, gunmen, and drifters as local history - the memory of the Texas frontier still close enough to feel like lived experience.

Home life centered on two powerful currents: a father whose work demanded stamina and pragmatism, and a mother whose health declined for years, becoming the emotional weather of the household. Howard grew up intensely attached to her, and her long illness cultivated both protectiveness and fatalism in him. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Cross Plains would alternate between hard times and brief prosperity; Howard watched men rise and fall with prices and luck, a volatility that later became the engine of his fiction, where civilization is thin and reversals are swift.

Education and Formative Influences

Howard attended local schools in Texas and briefly studied bookkeeping at a commercial college in Brownwood, but he was essentially self-made as a reader and stylist. He devoured adventure and historical writing, poetry, and myth, and he trained his ear on oral storytelling - tall tales, regional legends, and the clipped bravado of working men. A crucial formative influence was his long correspondence and friendship with H. P. Lovecraft beginning in 1930, an exchange that sharpened Howard's ideas about history, race, environment, and the fragility of human order while also reinforcing his sense that imagination could build entire worlds from the isolation of a small town.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Howard committed early to the pulp markets, breaking in with Weird Tales in the mid-1920s and quickly learning to write at speed with high dramatic compression. His signature creation, Conan the Cimmerian, debuted in "The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932) and became the centerpiece of a turbulent Hyborian Age that fused pseudo-history with kinetic violence and stark moral choices; other major cycles followed, including Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and the comic-brawling boxer Sailor Steve Costigan. He also wrote foundational weird-western and horror tales such as "Pigeons from Hell" (1938, posthumous). The decisive turning point in his life was not professional but personal: his mother's condition worsened in 1936, and after her final decline he died by suicide on June 11, 1936, in Cross Plains, at thirty. His output, concentrated into barely a decade of adult work, was nevertheless vast, driven by necessity, ambition, and a relentless inner pressure.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Howard's work is haunted by the sense that "civilization" is a temporary arrangement, an agreement enforced by strength and fear rather than ideals. His characters move through worlds where law is contingent, and the veneer of manners is often just another weapon; his blunt distrust of polite hypocrisy appears in lines like, "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing". That is not merely a joke but a diagnosis: his stories return again and again to what happens when consequences disappear and power becomes abstract - a theme sharpened by the boom-bust economy around him, where money could appear overnight and vanish just as fast.

Psychologically, Howard wrote from a posture of embattled self-reliance and persistent doubt, a combination that gave his prose its urgency. He saw his vocation as chosen against the grain of his surroundings, insisting, "I became a writer in spite of my environments". That sense of being an outsider in his own town fed a style built on momentum: short declarative sentences, muscular verbs, and scenes that turn on decisive acts rather than introspective delay. Yet beneath the surface certainty runs an awareness of personal limitation; the admission "I have not been a success, and probably never will be". reads less like self-pity than like an austere accounting, the same hard-eyed honesty his heroes apply to odds and wounds. In his best work, barbarism is not romantic innocence but a grim clarity, while civilization is both achievement and trap.

Legacy and Influence

After his death, Howard's reputation grew through the continued readership of Weird Tales, the championing of correspondents and editors, and later the mass-market revival of Conan in book form, culminating in comics, films, and a durable global franchise. More importantly, his fiction helped define modern sword-and-sorcery: fast, physical, and historically textured, with a moral atmosphere closer to tragedy than triumph. Writers from fantasy and horror traditions have borrowed his tempo, his world-building through action, and his central insight that history is a cycle of rise, decadence, and violent renewal. Howard's inner life - isolated, fiercely disciplined, and shadowed by grief - left behind not a diary of despair but a body of stories that still read like survival literature from an imagined past, written at white heat from a small Texas room that proved large enough to contain empires.