Legacy of Robert E. Howard
Howard's most famous character, Conan the Barbarian, has a pop-culture imprint that has been compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.
[1] The first Robert E. Howard novel was A Gent from Bear Creek, printed by British publisher Herbert Jenkins in 1937.
Martin Greenberg, owner of Gnome Press and a fan of Howard from the Weird Tales days, had approached Oscar Friend with a proposal for hardback reprints of all the Conan series.
Friend had written to Dr. Kuykendall in February 1954 stating that the Conan property was too valuable to allow to simply come to an end with the final Gnome Press book.
These stories were referred to as "posthumous collaborations," about which de Camp later wrote "it was mostly a matter of changing names, eliminating gunpowder, and dragging in a supernatural element."
De Camp had legal difficulties with Martin Greenberg and Gnome Publishing over unpaid monies, which eventually led to court and winning control over the Conan stories.
[13] By 1957 Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction said that H. P. Lovecraft and Howard "seemingly goes on forever; the two decades since their death are as nothing.
What with de Camp, Nyberg and Derleth avidly rooting out every scrap of their writings and expanding them into novels, there may never be an end to their posthumous careers".
[14] In the 1950s, a young fan named Glenn Lord began methodically scouring the country for hundreds of lost Howard stories and poems.
Lord traced he papers from one person to the next and was eventually able to recover the material, especially after offering a cash reward[citation needed].
[17][18] In 1966, de Camp made a deal with struggling Lancer Books to publish the existing Howard and non-Howard Conan corpus in paperback, along with additional material contributed by himself and his colleague and collaborator Lin Carter.
Sporting a set of now-classic covers painted by Frank Frazetta, the success of the Lancers created a decade-long "Howard boom" in the 1970s.
[21] Fan works appeared as well, the most significant of which were Amra and the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHupa).
Amra was a fanzine than began publication in 1959, created by L. Sprague de Camp and George Scithers, and grew to attract material from many famous authors and artists.
REHupa was formed in 1972 as an amateur press association, each of the small membership producing their own regular fanzine, which is sent to the Official Editor and subsequently disseminated to all members.
To simplify business matters a new company, Conan Properties, Inc., was formed in January 1970 which included both de Camp and Lord on its board of directors.
This movement began in 1977, led by author Karl Edward Wagner, who worked with Glenn Lord to produce the first pure Howard texts, in the public domain, from Berkeley Books.
They bought Howard's old house, then vacant, restored it and converted it into a museum that has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The Foundation was suggested by Paradox Entertainment, the current holders of the rights to most of the Howard's works, and was created with their co-operation.
The board members of the Foundation are Rusty Burke, Paul Herman, Patrice Louinet and, from Paradox, Fred Malmberg and Peter Sederowsky.
[citation needed] Two books published to correspond with the convention were Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, edited by Joe R. Lansdale and Scott A. Cupp, and Blood & Thunder by Mark Finn.
[36] In the decades following Howard's death, he often suffered at the hands of genre critics disdainful of Sword-and-Sorcery, such as Damon Knight,[37] but nevertheless his fame has grown exponentially, fueled largely by the character of Conan.
In his book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, de Camp describes an interview with J. R. R. Tolkien in which he "indicated that he rather liked Howard's Conan stories.
A current opinion is their material was tainted, however, due to de Camp's preconceived bias that Howard was an intensely troubled man.
[citation needed] The book met with a mixed reception and many fans considered it outright character assassination, while others praise it.
[citation needed] The interviews notes themselves are now archived with the rest of de Camp's papers in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
[40] Don Herron, in the acknowledgement for his book The Dark Barbarian, wrote that "with his uninspired 'additions' to the Conan canon, and especially for mixing his own stories and those of his inept collaborator Lin Carter in with Howard's own fiction, de Camp's reputation has been in steep decline in Howardian circles as the purist movement has come fully to the forefront.
The Dark Barbarian was the first critical volume on Howard to appear by an academic press, and has since been followed by a 2004 sequel titled The Barbaric Triumph.
Ten years later, the book was made into a critically acclaimed film called The Whole Wide World, starring Renée Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio.
[46] Howard's most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian, has a pop-culture imprint that has been compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.
