Robert E. Howard Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 in Texas, the only child of Dr. Isaac M. Howard, a country physician, and Hester Jane Ervin Howard. Because his father's medical work required travel, the family moved often through rough-and-tumble towns shaped by ranching and oil booms before settling in Cross Plains in the late 1910s. The small town would become his long-term home base and the landscape that framed his imagination. Quiet and observant as a boy, he read voraciously, especially history, myth, adventure, and poetry. The combination of frontier realities around him and a bookish immersion in the past forged the sensibility that would define his writing: a fascination with clash and endurance, with civilizations rising and crumbling, and with the raw energy of people struggling to survive.

Becoming a Professional Writer
By his teens, Howard was determined to write for a living. He targeted pulp magazines, where vivid storytelling and strong characters could find an audience. In 1925 he made his first professional sale to Weird Tales, a magazine that would remain central to his career. That success arrived during a precarious economic era, and he worked relentlessly, honing a direct, muscular prose style and learning how to tailor stories for different markets. He sold historical adventures, horror pieces, boxing yarns, humorous tall tales, and, eventually, the fantasies for which he became best known. Editors often paid slowly and unpredictably, yet he persisted, writing late into the night in the family home in Cross Plains.

Weird Tales and the Writer's Circle
Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright published many of Howard's key stories while also rejecting others, forcing him to continuously revise and diversify. Through Weird Tales correspondence, Howard became part of a loose circle of writers that included H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. His letters with Lovecraft are especially notable for their debates about civilization and barbarism, economics, and regional identity, revealing a restless, opinionated mind. Closer to home, he maintained long friendships with Tevis Clyde Smith, Truett Vinson, and Harold Preece, fellow Texans who read drafts, collaborated on small projects, and traded ideas. Their amateur journal exchanges and conversations kept him connected to a community even as he lived far from the literary centers of the country.

Characters, Genres, and Range
Howard's range was remarkable. In fantasy, he created Kull of Atlantis and Solomon Kane, a grim Puritan adventurer. He wrote of Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts, and El Borak, a hard-edged American operative in Central Asia. His boxing stories, featuring the comically stubborn Sailor Steve Costigan, were lively and popular, as were his humorous Westerns starring the outsized Breckinridge Elkins. In the early 1930s he introduced Conan the Cimmerian and the Hyborian Age, a mosaic of lost epochs that provided a backdrop for tales of sorcery, conflict, and survival. Stories such as The Tower of the Elephant, Queen of the Black Coast, and Red Nails distilled his themes into swift, vivid narratives. Though the term would be coined later, his work laid the foundation for what became known as sword-and-sorcery. He also wrote powerful horror, including pieces like The Black Stone and the chilling, posthumously celebrated Pigeons from Hell.

Work Habits and Beliefs
Howard approached writing as both craft and physical exertion. He trained with weights, boxed, and took long walks, believing that vigor seeped into the prose. He wrote quickly in bursts, then revised with an eye to pacing and impact. His letters and essays show a preoccupation with history's cycles and the costs of modern life, themes that recur in his fiction through haunted ruins, doomed empires, and fiercely independent protagonists. He was driven by professional pride, but the volatile markets of the Depression made finances uncertain even when his byline appeared frequently.

Family and Relationships
Howard's relationship with his parents, especially his mother, was central to his life. Hester Howard's long illness required constant attention, and he remained at home to help care for her. The duties weighed on him but also deepened his sense of loyalty and responsibility. He formed a significant relationship with Novalyne Price, a schoolteacher in the region who later became known as Novalyne Price Ellis. Their courtship was intense and sometimes difficult, shaped by his obligations at home, his erratic income, and his consuming writing schedule. Her later memoir offered an intimate view of his intelligence, humor, stubbornness, and vulnerability.

Agent, Markets, and Professional Standing
As his career advanced, Howard broadened his submissions beyond Weird Tales, placing stories with adventure and action magazines. He worked with literary agent Otis Adelbert Kline to reach additional markets, particularly for his Westerns and boxing tales. Despite occasional clashes with editorial tastes, he won a loyal readership with his distinctive voice. Fellow writers in the Weird Tales orbit recognized his gifts, and his correspondence with Lovecraft and others indicates a professional respect that crossed stylistic differences and long distances.

Final Years and Death
By the mid-1930s Howard was both productive and under strain. He continued to publish across genres, but his mother's declining health and the uncertainties of the pulp economy pressed on him. In 1936, after learning that his mother was not expected to recover, he died by suicide in Cross Plains. She died shortly thereafter. His father, Dr. Isaac Howard, survived him and became steward of his son's manuscripts and memory. The tragedy stunned his circle of friends and editors, who understood how closely his life had been tied to his family and his work.

Legacy
After his death, readers and writers kept his stories alive. Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and other characters moved from pulps into books and then into comics, films, and games, expanding his reach far beyond the modest magazines where he began. Scholars and fans mined his letters with H. P. Lovecraft for insights into two major voices of American weird fiction. Novalyne Price Ellis's memoir added a personal dimension that deepened public understanding of the man behind the tales. Today, Robert E. Howard is widely regarded as a foundational figure in modern fantasy, a master of momentum and atmosphere whose work combined a Texan's eye for the frontier with a scholar's passion for the ancient world. His stories, written in a small town with typewriter clatter and the scent of mesquite outside, continue to find new readers and to shape the heroic imagination.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Writing - Failure - Work - Savage - Career.

Other people realated to Robert: H. P. Lovecraft (Novelist), Gary Gygax (Inventor), L. Sprague de Camp (Author), Frank Frazetta (Artist), Boris Vallejo (Artist)