Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert E. Howard

The snap-zoom from "I lived" to "and yet live, mainly" tells you Robert E. Howard is doing something more complicated than a regional postcard. He is positioning himself as a man physically in one place and imaginatively elsewhere, a writer whose body is stuck in the economic machinery of early-20th-century Texas while his mind is off inventing barbarian kingdoms and lost ages. That parenthetical "mainly" is the tell: he is both claiming the authenticity of proximity and quietly admitting distance, a split identity rendered in a single shrug.

The list itself is doing cultural work. "Cotton, wheat, cattle, oil" compresses an entire social order into commodities: agriculture, ranching, extraction. It's a world organized around what comes out of the ground or off the land, with boom-and-bust baked into it. Oil, especially, signals the modern intruding on the pastoral, money arriving fast and leaving faster, reshaping small towns into speculative fever dreams. Then comes the polite add-on: "with the usual percentage of business men and professional men". "Usual percentage" makes the middle class sound like an expected contaminant or bureaucratic garnish, not a romantic calling. It's a dry demographic aside that implies Howard's real interest is in the raw-producing classes, the people closer to labor, risk, and physicality.

Context matters: Howard wrote from a milieu that often treated art as suspiciously impractical. The sentence reads like an origin myth for his fiction: born in a place that measures worth in yields and herds, he turns to stories that measure it in strength, struggle, and survival.