Texas writer creates Conan the Barbarian

The instant Robert Ervin Howard learned his comatose mother was not long for this world, the fantasy writer decided Jun. 11, 1936 would be his last day on earth.

Bob Howard was born in 1906 at Peaster but left the wide-spot-in-the-road while still in diapers. His father, a footloose country doctor, dragged his frail wife and only child from town to town before finally settling down at Cross Plains southeast of Abilene.

Physically weak and introverted as a child, Howard was what people back then called a “mama’s boy.” Mother and son developed, as one biographer put it, “a neurotic dependence on each other” that only grew stronger with time.

Rather than commute the 33 miles to Brownwood for his senior year of high school, Howard and his mother lived in a boardinghouse. After graduation in 1923, he spent two unsatisfying years in his hometown working a series of odd jobs.

Howard returned to Brownwood to study bookkeeping at Howard Payne College. Remembering his boyhood ambition to be a writer and a solemn vow never to “grind at some clock-punch job,” he became a regular contributor to the student newspaper.

The turning point came in 1925 with the sale of his first story to “Weird Tales.” His reward for “Spear and Fang,” a tale of Cro-Magnons versus Neanderthals, was $18.

Encouraged by this initial success, Howard resolved to earn his living as a full-time writer for the pulp magazine market. Neighbors complained that the incessant pounding of his typewriter, as well as his habit of shouting dialogue out loud, kept them awake at night, but the budding author paid them no mind. He was too busy making his dream come true.

The recluse, who never threw a punch, hated hunting and avoided contact with the opposite sex, spun exciting yarns about men of action that women always found irresistible. He began by writing about boxers, gunfighters and other real-life adventurers but soon progressed to pure fantasy inventing his very own genre -- Sword and Sorcery.

First came Solomon Kane, the Puritanical scourge of ghosts and vampires in Elizabethan England, who made his debut in 1928. Kane was followed the next year by King Kull, a warrior of fabled Atlantis who won the throne of Valusia before the continent sank beneath the waves. Bran Mak Morn, a savage barbarian who battled the Roman legions and supernatural enemies, appeared in 1932.

That was also the year Howard introduced his most popular character and the one for which he is best known today. He cast Conan the Cimmerian in the leading role of no fewer than 17 action-packed epics during a prolific, two-year period.

Howard did not put on pretentious airs when discussing his characters and, by implication, his writing. “They’re simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot or slug themselves into the clear.”

He also insisted that his flights of fantasy were not the product of a vivid imagination but his dreams. “I have lived in the Southwest all my life,” he explained, “yet most of my dreams are laid in cold, giant lands of icy wastes and gloomy skies, and of wild, wind-swept fens and wildernesses over which sweep great sea-winds, and which are inhabited by shock-head savages with light fierce eyes.”

Howard had the last laugh on townspeople, who poked fun at him. At the depths of the Depression in 1935, he paid cash for a brand-new Chevrolet, an eye-popping purchase no one else in Cross Plains could have possibly afforded.

A few months later, however, he was forced to face the fact that his mother was losing her long fight with tuberculosis. So despondent he could not put a single word on paper, he told a friend that he could not picture life without her. “Sometimes,” he said, “it takes more courage to live than to die.”

Howard went to see his mother on a June morning in 1936 and found she had lapsed into a coma. A tactless nurse informed him that she would never regain consciousness and had only hours to live.

Grief-stricken but clear-headed, Howard hurried home and typed his last words: “All fled, all done, So lift me on the pyre; The feast is over, The lamps expire.”

He walked to his car, took a pistol from the glove compartment and shot himself in the head. Bob Howard died eight hours later in the bed next to his mother, and she joined him the next day. Mother and son were buried side-by-side in a Brownwood cemetery.

When Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard passed away seven years later, he left a trunk containing his son’s manuscripts to a fellow doctor. The royalties from Bob Howard’s published works, which never amounted to more than $100 annually, went to him until his death in 1959.

By the early 1980s, the second doctor’s elderly widow was getting six-figure checks in the mail every three months. Reprints of Robert E. Howard’s 50 year old stories were selling like hot cakes thanks to a Sword and Sorcery revival and a couple of Conan movies starring a future governor of California.

“Depression-Era Desperadoes” tells the exciting stories of Bonnie & Clyde and other outlaws of the Thirties. Order your copy today by mailing a check for $24.00 to “Bartee Haile,” P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.