Robert E. Howard's house in Cross Plains, Texas, is now a museum celebrating his life.

It’s dark outside and Robert E. Howard is wrapping up his latest story. Twelve hours banging away at his Underwood typewriter—a normal day’s work, short even, by his standards. Sometimes he writes for 18 hours.  He has to. He needs the money. The medical bills for his mother keep rising. Lately, ever since the operation on her spleen, he is constantly taking breaks from writing to feed her, change her clothes and bathe her. 

He wishes he could take a break now and go boxing. He wishes he had a beer. But with the pulp magazines rejecting half his stories, he has to work twice as hard to break even. Locked away in a tiny room next to his mom’s, he is putting the finishing touches on a story called “Red Nails.” It is his final adventure about Conan the Barbarian, the culmination of everything he wants to say about his favorite character.  There is gore, sex, action and mystery, and after 21 stories, he feels he’s finally got it right. This is his best one yet.

To anyone who lived in the sedentary town of Cross Plains, Texas, back in the 1930s, the Howard House was well known.  During the day, Howard could be heard inside the tiny one-bedroom house, shouting his prose in a West Texas drawl as he worked on his prized 1925 Underwood. To neighbors, it was like hearing the voice of a madman, letting his aggressions out on the page while pounding the keys like a percussion instrument.  “CONAN BEAT  DOWN OPPOSITION BY THE SHEER WEIGHT AND POWER OF HIS BLOWS, BREAKING SPEARS, SPLITTING SKULLS AND CLEAVING BOSOMS TO THE BREASTBONE,” he would bark to his typewriter.

Howard was a man possessed by the writing process.  He wrote feverishly for 15 years, creating stories of far-off worlds inhabited by monsters, wizards and warriors.  With characters such as Kull the Conqueror, Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn, he created a new genre, “Sword and Sorcery”—before J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote about the Hobbits. Howard’s most famous creation, a brooding, hulking warrior not far removed from Robert himself, became a household name: Conan the Cimmerian, or as we now know him, Conan the Barbarian. In four short years, Howard wrote 21 full stories about the barbarian including a full-length novel. “He was the damndest bastard who ever was,” Howard once told his girlfriend Novalyne Price.  “He’s my bread and butter.  I do bang out a western or adventure yarn now and then, but mostly, I go along with Conan.”  Then, at the age of 30, Howard shot himself.

Howard’s characters, however, refused to die. They grew in notoriety, surfacing in hundreds of books, comics and movies over the last half century. Today, Conan is a pulp icon like Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Zorro. Yet little is known of his creator.  Only the most devout fantasy fans know that a lonely young man growing up in West Texas in the 1930s crafted one of the most captivating heroes in American literature. Though Howard’s world was desolate in the arts—Cross Plains was a town populated by farmers and oil roustabouts, after all—his tales inspired generations of fantasy writers like Robert Jordan, who created The Wheel of Time series, and Harry Turtledove, known as the master of alternative history. Stephen King is a fan, too, praising Howard’s writing as “so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks.”  Scholars compare him to other American writers who dwelled on dark themes: Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Chandler and Herman Melville.

Howard’s story is not unlike Conan’s; it’s a yarn that seems larger than life, mythical in moments, but ultimately Texan. He was born in Peaster, Texas, in 1906—a turbulent time in Texas history when oil was the new gold rush and money-grubbers and opportunists around the country traveled to Texas in hopes of striking it rich. Dr. Isaac Howard, Robert’s father, was an admired general practitioner who moved his family around the state like a band of gypsies, going from boomtown to boomtown, looking for prosperity. Hester Howard, Robert’s mother, was a well-educated, proper southern woman who hated the uprooted lifestyle. Though often sick—she suffered from tuberculosis throughout her son’s life—she read and recited poetry to her son daily.

Dr. Howard finally settled down in Cross Plains, anticipating an oil boom–which struck in 1920. Suddenly, the quiet little town was overrun by calloused roughnecks, hardened criminals and sleazy business tycoons.  With them came gambling, prostitution, theft and violence.  The world outside of small Cross Plains seemed cruel, too. Texas was caught in the middle of World War I and the Mexican War of Independence. Robert began to see life as bleak and the world as barbaric.  He would use his philosophy in many of his writings and poetry, especially in his Conan stories.
Robert’s thirst for stories was insatiable from an early age. His father, a gifted tall-teller, would entertain him with yarns during long road trips between oil towns.  Young Robert would beg the family cook, a black elderly woman named Aunt Mary, for the gothic, violent stories of her ancestors’ slavery in Louisiana.  But it was his grandmother’s Celtic ghost stories that horrified the young boy, hitting a raw nerve in Robert that drove him to tell stories the rest of his life.

The nomadic lifestyle made for few friends as a child. Instead, his best mates were the works of Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and William Shakespeare.  Books were scarce in Robert’s part of the world. Finding them in his travels was like unearthing buried treasure.  After reading his way through every book in the local high school library, he drove one night to a nearby town, busted into their school and stole a box load of books to get his literary fix, or so he told one schoolmate.  The friend wasn’t sure if it was just another of Robert’s tall tales, but he wouldn’t put it past him. By the time of his death, Howard had amassed more than 300 books in his home—the biggest collection in town.

He learned to write through mistakes.  When he began sending his short action stories to magazines at age 15, everything was rejected. Howard had a basic understanding of how to write from reading London and his other favorites, but he didn’t how to write a short, punchy story in the style of the pulp magazines.  He began studying his market, dissecting stories, looking for formula, analyzing how the story was shaped.  “Writing is a lot like architecture,” Howard wrote to friend Clyde Smith.  “The whole structure has to suit—each piece has to be in place.  A master of the game, like Kipling, for instance, or Jack London, always places the pieces right. A dub like me stumbles on to the right combination once in every five hundred stories he writes.”

The pulp author he most wanted to emulate was legendary science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft. In 1930, he started a correspondence with Lovecraft, who apparently saw raw talent in the young Texan and mentored him by mail (when he wasn’t shooting off feisty retorts to their political debates).
It took Howard three years of writing, submitting and failing until 1924, when Weird Tales bought one of his stories, “Spear and Fang,” an action yarn about battling cavemen. Farnsworth Wright, the editor, informed Howard he would receive $25 upon publication. It took six months before the story was published and a check sent, but Howard didn’t mind. His writing career had begun at the age of 18.

Like Conan, Howard was an intimidating figure at 6 ft and 195 lbs.  Although he disliked the roughnecks in his town, he looked like one. Scrawny as a kid, he spent years exercising so he could look like the musclebound characters he wrote about. “When I was in school, I had to take a lot because I was alone and had no one to take my part,” he wrote to Lovecraft once. “...When a scoundrel crosses me up, I can, with my bare hands, tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back.” As part of his conditioning, he took up boxing—and got the opportunity to bludgeon the town’s roughnecks in a sanctioned fight. The euphoric feeling of victory after knocking down an opponent and the referee raising his hand in victory nearly changed his life. But he quit boxing in 1931 when he realized the money wasn’t there.

Boxing fueled his art, however. One of his heroes was boxer Steve Costigan, who some scholars say was Howard’s alter ego. Howard obsessed over fight scenes in his stories and approached writing for pulps as a fighter would an opponent: He studied the market looking for a place to strike and barraged editors with stories like a flurry of punches, always searching for that knockout (like Conan) that would sell. When he was beat down from rejection letter after rejection letter, he would just pick himself up and continue the fight.

Conan first entered Howard’s life on vacation. He was relaxing in Mission, Texas, after several hard weeks of writing when the image of Conan appeared in his head, out of nowhere.  Once the warrior arrived, he put Howard to work.  “I did not create him by any conscious process,” Howard wrote to fellow Weird Tales writer Clark Ashton Smith in 1935. “He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of adventures.” Although he claimed there was no conscious effort, Howard told his girlfriend Novalyne that Conan was an amalgamation of various characters he grew up around–roughnecks, cowboys and boxers.

Howard would talk about Conan and his adventures to anybody who would listen, gesticulating while sharing plot twists and action scenes. In letters to friends, Howard said he was obsessed with the barbarian and couldn’t stop writing about him.  He’d try to switch gears and write a western or a comedy, but ultimately, he’d always come back to Conan. It was as if the character stood behind him at his typewriter, clutching a war hammer menacingly, threatening to brain his creator unless he transcribed all his adventures.

After all his early rejections, the Conan stories sold well.  Weird Tales magazine, Howard’s biggest publisher, enjoyed overwhelming feedback and commercial success with every issue featuring a new Conan story.  In 1934, his sales hit $1,853.05, making Howard one of the most profitable men in Cross Plains, second only to the bank president.

In the summer of 1935, however, after writing about Conan for three years, he felt his time with the barbarian was finished. It was another blistering July day when, lost in his thoughts, Howard shuffled to the Post Office down the street from his house. He frequently took this walk to send off his latest story, hoping it would make him some money.  He used the time to map out the next story in his head.  Sometimes he acted out the action scenes while walking. On occasion, people in town witnessed him in the street, throwing jabs and uppercuts in the air. There goes that freak again, they thought.

The people of Cross Plains didn’t think too highly of Howard. What kind of young man would go around mumbling to himself? Punching an imaginary enemy? What kind of young man chooses to write for a living?  That ain’t no living. Why, he’s just leeching off poor Isaac Howard, that nice doctor.  And you know what he spends all his time writing about?  Ghosts and warriors and harlots. All just sex and violence.  He should be ashamed of himself.  I heard he carries a pistol in his car.  And he sleepwalks at night! The rumors were rampant. One time, Howard grew a walrus mustache, dressed up in black and wore a sombrero around town just to get a rise out of people.

Today on his walk to the post office, Howard had other things on his mind.  Weird Tales owed him $800 for his stories.  The magazine was in financial crisis.  It was 1936, the depths of the Depression, and money was scarce.  Unfortunately for Howard, his money problems were consuming his life.  Medical bills for his mother had skyrocketed and his father, estranged from his wife, was rarely home because of his patients.

On Friday night that week, Howard wanted to get away from his troubles. He asked Novalyne if she wanted to go drive around with him in his 1935 Chevrolet and talk like they used to. Novalyne agreed. Robert was “Exuberant.  Vital.  Interested in talking,” Novalyne wrote in her journal (later published and adapted into the 1996 movie “The Whole Wide World” starring Renée Zellweger). He had finished writing “Red Nails,” and his female character, Conan’s passionate love interest, was his strongest to date.  Valeria was a sassy, blonde, independent woman with a hell of a temper.  In other words, she was a lot like Novalyne.

“What’s this one about?” Novalyne said.

“I think this time I’m going to make it one of the sexiest, goriest yarns I’ve ever written,” Robert said.  “I don’t think you’d care for it.”

“Not if it’s gory.  What do you mean ‘sexy stories’?”

“My god.  My Conan yarns are filled with sex.”

“You have sex in the Conan yarns?”

“Hell yes.  That’s what he did—drinking, whoring, fighting.  What else was there in life?”
Less than a week later, he discovered that Novalyne, the only girl he ever dated, the only girl he ever cared for, was seeing one of his best friends behind his back.  It tore Howard up. He remembered a recurring nightmare where in a past life, all his girlfriends were taken by his best friends.  He used to tell Novalyne about it. “He didn’t know how men and women acted in real life,” Novalyne wrote in her journal. “He was ‘different’ from other people.  He was talented, and his mind ran to worlds created on paper.  When he was young, he could have learned how to cope with ordinary life situations, but he had been more interested in books than people.”

On the morning of June 11, 1936, Howard asked a nurse attending his unconscious mother what her diagnosis was.  She told him his mother would never wake from her coma. In a trance, he shuffled out of the room, and out the door to his house, staggered to his Chevy parked in the driveway, and fished for the .380 Colt automatic pistol in the glove box.

Howard’s dreams, his writing, even his caretaking, were useless.  He had no one anymore. He raised the gun to his temple. A poem swept through his head.

“All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;

The feast is over, and the lamps expire”

He pulled the trigger.

Howard died eight hours later at home.  The poem of the pyre was found typed on a sliver of paper in his billfold. Scholars believe they were the last words Howard ever typed, a suicide note, rewritten from a poem by Viola Garvin’s “The House of Cesar.” Howard’s father was still alive when his son committed suicide, but he too died a few years later.

Howard’s story didn’t end there, however. Conan survived and became an iconic pulp character in paperbacks of the 1960s, a franchise for Marvel Comics in the 1970s, a box office behemoth that launched the acting career of a certain California governor in the 1980s, a children’s cartoon in the 1990s, and today a video game favorite, commanding multiple titles on each game console.  Millennium Films new, big budget Conan movie is slated for filming later this year and Howard’s writings are being reprinted in new editions around the world.The Howard House, now a historical site, stands a couple of blocks away from downtown Cross Plains. A local community group, Project Pride, bought the house in the 1980s and converted it into a museum of Howard’s life. Local Era Lee Hanke opens the house to more than 350 people a year who travel across the globe to pay homage to Howard. The 79-year-old talks for hours about Robert as she points out trinkets and artifacts. Sometimes, the visitors know more than she does. One fan stood alone in Howard’s tiny room in front of the 1925 Underwood typewriter, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and in a low voice recited from memory a full 44-stanza poem of Howard’s called “Solomon Kane’s Homecoming.”

Cross Plains held the centennial celebration of Howard’s birth in 2006.  Hundreds of fans gathered for a three-day celebration of a writer who was special to them, who continues to captivate imaginations.  They visited his gravesite and toasted to his life.  They wanted him to know he was not alone.