His mother had been ill with tuberculosis her entire life, and upon learning she had entered a coma from which she was not expected to wake, he walked out to his car parked outside his kitchen window and shot himself in the head while sitting in the driver's seat.

[24] That same year, sitting in a library in New Orleans while his father took medical courses at a nearby college, Howard discovered a book concerned with the scant fact and abundant legends surrounding an indigenous culture in ancient Scotland called the Picts.

Cross Plains' population quickly grew from 1,500 to 10,000, it suffered overcrowding, the traffic ruined its unpaved roads and vice crime exploded but it also used its new wealth on civic improvements, including a new school, an ice manufacturing plant, and new hotels.

[34][35] In the fall of 1922, when Howard was sixteen, he temporarily moved to a boarding house in the nearby city of Brownwood to complete his senior year of high school, accompanied by his mother.

[44] During the same period, Howard made his first attempt to write a novel, a loosely autobiographical book modeled on Jack London's Martin Eden and titled Post Oaks & Sand Roughs.

[48][49] In conjunction with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, he dabbled heavily in verse, writing hundreds of poems and getting dozens published in Weird Tales and assorted poetry journals.

With poor sales, and many publishers recoiling from his subject matter, Howard ultimately judged poetry writing a luxury he could not afford, and after 1930 he wrote little verse, instead dedicating his time to short stories and higher-paying markets.

He relaxed by visiting the Neeb Ice House, to which he was introduced by an oil field worker befriended at the drug store, to drink and began to take part in boxing matches.

At twenty-three years of age, from the middle of nowhere in Texas, he had become a full-time writer; he was making good money and his father began bragging about his success, not to mention buying multiple copies of his work in the pulps.

[73] When Farnsworth Wright started a new pulp in 1930 called Oriental Stories, Howard was overjoyed—here was a venue where he could run riot through favorite themes of history and battle and exotic mysticism.

In addition to series characters such as Turlogh Dubh O'Brien and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, Howard sold a variety of tales depicting various times and periods from the fall of Rome to the fifteenth century.

[69][74][75] In August 1930 Howard wrote a letter to Weird Tales praising a recent reprint of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" and discussing some of the obscure Gaelic references used within.

In Fredericksburg, while overlooking sullen hills through a misty rain, he conceived of the fantasy land of Cimmeria, a bitter hard northern region home to fearsome barbarians.

Later, in 1935, Howard claimed in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith that Conan "simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande."

"[99][100] In a letter dated March 10, 1932, Farnsworth Wright rejected "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" but noted that "The Phoenix on the Sword" had "points of real excellence" and suggested changes.

[102] Instead of abandoning the entire Conan concept, as had happened with previous failed characters, Howard rewrote "The Phoenix on the Sword" based on Wright's feedback and including material from his essay.

The novel A Gent from Bear Creek was due to be published by Herbert Jenkins in England, and by all accounts it looked as if he was finally breaking out of the pulps and into the more prestigious book market.

All of his close friends had married and were immersed in their careers, Novalyne Price had left Cross Plains for graduate school, and his most reliable market, Weird Tales, had grown far behind on its payments.

The words sounded familiar to her, but it was only in early June 1936 that she found the source in Macbeth:[145] I have liv'd long enough: my way of lifeIs fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;And that which should accompany old age,As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,I must not look to have; but, in their stead,Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.In the weeks before his suicide, Howard wrote to Kline giving his agent instructions of what to do in case of his death, he wrote his last will and testament, and he borrowed a .380 Colt Automatic from his friend Lindsey Tyson.

In June 1936, as Hester Howard slipped into her final coma, her son maintained a death vigil with his father and friends of the family, getting little sleep, drinking huge amounts of coffee, and growing more despondent.

In "Wings in the Night", for instance, Howard writes that: The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth.

[168] Howard's parents were both natural storytellers of different kinds and he grew up in early 20th century Texas, an environment in which the telling of tall tales was a standard form of entertainment.

[174] Howard's distinctive literary style relies on a combination of existentialism, poetic lyricism, violence, grimness, humour, burlesque, and a degree of hardboiled realism.

[178] One of the most common themes in Howard's writing is based on his view of history, a repeating pattern of civilizations reaching their peak, becoming decadent, decaying and then being conquered by another people.

[185] Another inspiration for Howard was Theosophy and the theories of Helena Blavatsky and William Scott-Elliot, who described lost civilizations, ancient wisdom, races, magic and sunken continents and the lands of Lemuria, Atlantis and Hyperborea, and also influenced other writers of weird fiction.

[186] Howard influenced and inspired later writers including Samuel R. Delany, David Gemmell, Michael Moorcock, Matthew Woodring Stover, Charles R. Saunders, Karl Edward Wagner, Paul Kearney, Steven Erikson, Joe R. Lansdale, and William King.

The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years.

In 1989 and 1991, Necronomicon Press published Robert E. Howard: Selected Letters in two volumes (1923–1930 and 1931–1936) edited by Glenn Lord with Rusty Burke, S. T. Joshi, and Steve Behrends.

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.

In 1966, de Camp made a deal with Lancer Books to republish the Conan series, which led to the "First Howard Boom" of the 1970s; their popularity was enhanced by the cover artwork of Frank Frazetta on most of the volumes.