Weird Tales: Texas Writer's Pulp Legacy Lives On

By Christopher Fulbright

Robert E. Howard was raised in West Texas, but his creative mind dwelt in the medieval land of the Celts, the Picts, and the fictional homeland of his most famous literary creation, Conan the Barbarian.

Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, but he lived most of his short life in Cross Plains, 40 miles southeast of Abilene. He began writing at an early age and sold his first short story, “Spear and Fang,” in 1924 to Weird Tales, the magazine in which Conan the Barbarian would debut eight years later. While best known for the brawny Conan’s swashbuckling adventures in a world of savage grandeur, Howard was a poet and prolific author who created a number of other fantasy characters, including Red Sonja, Kull the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane.

Howard’s future seemed assured, but just as sales of his fiction reached an all-time high, he committed suicide at the age of 30, depressed by news that his mother would not recover from a coma. A handful of volumes—most notably One Who Walked Alone, by Novalyne Price Ellis, a Brownwood teacher who had dated Howard in his last years—shed some light on the writer’s complex personality and his relationship to his mother.

In the years since his death, Robert Howard’s reputation as a writer and Conan the Barbarian’s fame have continued to grow. A Web site (www.rehupa.com) caters to Howard scholars. A 1982 film, Conan the Barbarian, and a sequel starred a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1991, a Texas Historical Marker was placed at Howard's grave site, in Brownwood's Greenleaf Cemetery. (His mother died the day after his suicide; they were buried on the same day next to each other.) In 1996, The Whole Wide World, a well-received film based on the Ellis memoir, starred Vincent D’Onofrio and Texan Renée Zellweger as Robert and Novalyne.

The Howard home, at 625 West 4th (open by appointment; call 254/725-7251, 725-6562, or 725-6498), is now a museum honoring Robert’s life and work. A local, nonprofit civic organization called Project Pride oversees it. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 1994, the home will be open to the public during the annual Robert E. Howard Days, which takes place in Cross Plains the second weekend in June (June 11-12, 2004).

See the full article in the May 2004 issue of Texas Highways.