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Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas (not in Cross Plains, as has been written elsewhere), and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. His father was a local physician, and both
his parents came from pioneer stock. Howard received his main education in Cross Plains and completed his high-school career in Brownwood, at Brownwood High School and Howard Payne Academy. After taking a few courses at Brownwood College, he plunged into
free-lance writing. As a boy, Howard's precocious intellect made him something of a misfit, especially in Texas. For a time he suffered the bullying that is the usual lot of brilliant but puny boys. Partly as a result, he became a sport and exercise fanatic and an accomplished boxer and horseman. That soon ended the bullying, especially since in maturity he was six feet tall and weighted over 200 pounds, most of it muscle. His personality was introverted, unconventional, moody, and hot-tempered, given to emotional extremes and violent likes and dislikes. Like most young writers, he read voraciously. He was a pen pal of the fantasy writers H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. During his last ten years (1927-36), Howard turned out a huge volume of general pulp-magazine fiction: sport, detective, Western, historical, oriental-adventure, weird, and ghost stories, besides his poetry and his many fantasies. In his late twenties he earned more money from his writing than any other man in Cross Plains, including the town banker - although that is not saying much, since during the Depression years magazine rates were low and payment was often late. Although moderatley successful in his work and a big, powerful man like his heroes, Howard was maladjusted to the point of psychois. For several years before his death, he talked of suicide. At thirty, learning that his aged mother - to whom he was excessively devoted - was on the point of death, he ended a promising career by shooting himself. His novella Red Nails, a Conan story, and his interplanetary novel Almuric were published posthumously in Weird Tales. Howard wrote several series of tales of herioc fantasy, most of them published in Weird Tales. Howard was a natural story-teller, whose narratives are unsurpassed for vivid, gripping headlong action. His heros - King, Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh O'Brien, Solomon Kane - are larger than life: men of mighty, hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. Howard thus explained his preference for heroes of massive muscles but simple minds: "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."Of all Howard's fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan stories. These are laid in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand years ago, between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded history. He wrote - at at least began - over two dozen Conan stories. Of those, eighteen were published during or just after his lifetime, one in a fan magazine and the rest in Weird Tales. Howard explained how he came to write about Conan thus: "While I don't go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existing spirits or powers (though I am rather oppoosed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present - or even the future - work through the thought and actions of living men. This occured to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen - or rather off my type-writer - almost without effort on my part.During the last two decades (circa 1967), a large number of unpublished story manuscripts have turned up in collections of Howard's papers. These include eight Conan stories, some complete and some in the form of unfinished manuscripts, outlines, or fragments. It has been my lot to prepare most of these stories for publication, completing those that were incomplete. I have also, in collaboration with my colleagues Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, written several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill gaps in the saga. Two of these are included in the present volume. When the story The God in the Bowl appeared in manuscript in 1951, I revised it considerably for publication. For the present edition, however, I have gone back to the original manuscript and produced a version much closer to the original, with a bare minimum of editorial changes. Some Conan stories have been reprinted many times; others appear for the first time in Lancer Books' paperback series of Conan tales. The present volume is chronologically the first volume of the complete Conan saga, although several of the later volumes have already been published. When complete, the series will comprise at least eight volumes and probably more, with all the stories in proper chronological order. Heroic Fantasy is the name I have given to a sub-genre of fiction, otherwise called the sword-and-sorcery story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may (as in the Conan stories) be this Earth as it is concieved to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension. Such a story combines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape ficition wherein all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine. William Morris pioneered the herioc fantasy in Great Britain in the 1880s. In the early years of this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R. Eddison developed the genre further. In the 1930s, the appearance of the magazines Weird Tales and, later, Unknown Worlds furnished outlets for stories of this type, and many memorable sword-and-sorcery narratives were written. These include Howard's stories of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane; Clark Ashton Smith's macabre tales of Hyperborea, Atlantis, Averoigne, and the future continent of Zothique; Henry Kuttner's Atlnatean stories; C.L. Moore's narratives of Jirel of Joiry; and Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser stories. (I might also mention Fletcher Pratt's amd my tales of Harold Shea.) After the Second World War, the magazine market for stories od this kind shrank, and it looked for a while as if fantasy had become a casualty of the machine age, Then, with the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, and the reprinting of many earlier works in the field, the genre revivied. Now it is flourishing again (cicra 1967), and it is inevitable that one of its giants - Robert E. Howard - and his greatest imaginative effort - the Conan saga - should be made available. For readers who want more Conan stories, or who like heroic fantasy, or who wish to more about Howard and his works, many publications are available. First, as I have already explained, Lancer Books, Inc., is publishing the complete Conan cycle in eight or more volumes, of which this is chronologically the first. Four others have appeared; Conan the Adventurer, Conan the Warrior, Conan the Usurper, and Conan the Conqueror. Several more volumes are planned, to fill the gap between this volume and Conan the Adventurer and to recount Conan's adventures in later life. Lancer Books has also published a volume of Howard's earlier stories, King Kull, about a barbarian hero, Kull of Atlantis. Glenn Lord, agent for the Howard estate, editied the volume, and Lin Carter completed the unfinished stories. Of the seven clothbound volumes of Conan stories published in the early 1950's by Gnome Press, Inc., two are (or at last accounts were (circa 1967)) still in print. These are Tales of Conan, by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, and The Return of Conan, by Bjorn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp. George H. Scithers publishes Amra, the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of herioc fantasy and of Howard's Conan stories in particular. Glenn Lord, in addtion to handling Howard's manuscripts and the rights to his works, publishes The Howard Collector, a magazine devoted to Howard, containing articles, stories, poems, and letters by and about him and bibliographical materials on his writings. August Derleth has published a collection of Howard's less well-known fantasies, The Dark Man and Others (Arkham House). Derleth's anthologies Over the Edge (Arkham House), Dark Mind, Dark Heart (London: Mayflower-Dell), and Sleep No More (London: Panther Books) each contain one Howard story. So do Leo Margulies's paperbacked anthologies Weird Tales and World of Weird (Pyramind Books), L. Sprague de Camp's three anthologies of herioc fantasy: Swords and Sorcery, The Spell of Seven, and the Fantastic Swordsmen (Pyramid Books), Alden H. Norton's anthology Horror Times Ten (Berkeley Publishing Co.), and Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The Macabre Reader (Ace Books). Ace Books also publishes Howard's interplanetary novel Almuric. Donald M. Grant has published two volumes of Howard's humorous Western stories, A Gent from Bear Creek and The Pride of Bear Creek with another promised. Grant will also soon publish Howard's stories of Solomon Kane, the adventurous English Puritan of the early 1600's, under the title Red Shadows. |