Damon C. Sasser just picked up the latest issue of the Robert E. Howard: Two-Gun Raconteur journal from the printer. It will be available at Howard Days 2010 on June 11.

Since the announcement of the fourteenth issue of the TGR journal on TC last April, Damon has posted some updates on its contents, which will be detailed below.

Above, you can see Michael L. Peters’ cover featuring El Borak. Two of his drawings from a four-plate Solomon Kane portfolio based on “The Hills of the Dead” are also illustrating this blog entry.

(Continue reading this post)

Although The Cimmerian’s days are numbered, the legacy and works of Robert E. Howard will live on and on. The TC print journal and its accompanying blog did their part to preserve his legacy, and I was proud to be a part of it, but we were literally laboring in the shadow of a giant who will continue be read for as long as the world exists.

With my days as a TC blogger winding down I thought I’d get back to the reasons why I (and perhaps if I may be so bold, extend that to the plural we) love the life and works of REH—and why he continues to enthrall us.

(Continue reading this post)

Last year, Bill Thom won the first Munsey Award, given “to a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy” for his hard work on Coming Attractions, an indispensable resource on Pulp-related news that I peruse each week and where I found dozens of news items to announce on The Cimmerian these last six months. This year, essayist (and Cimmerian journal-contributor) Don Herron is nominated.  Don Herron authored several seminal pieces on Robert E. Howard –you can read Brian Murphy’s appreciation of Don’s “milestones in Howard studies” here on the Cimmerian blog.

Besides his literary criticism about the Bard of Cross Plains, Don Herron is also an authority on Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, Philip K. Dick and the Emperor of Dreams, Clark Ashton Smith. He created the Dashiell Hammet Tour in 1977 and has lead Hammett aficionados through San Francisco every year since then.

(Continue reading this post)

The Dark Man, vol. 5, no. 1

The most recent issue of The Dark Man (vol. 5, no. 1), the peer-reviewed journal of Robert E. Howard studies is now available from Gavinicuss Books and Mike Chomko Books. This issue contains three articles from REH scholars Charles Hoffman, Jeffrey Kahan, and Philip Emery as well as several reviews by Hoffman and Morgan Holmes. This week I would like to take a closer look at the three main articles in this issue and add a few comments of my own.

The first article, “’The Shadow of the Beast’: A Closer Look,” by Hoffman discusses one of the more unseemly sides of Howard’s work in analyzing the theme of miscegenation in “Shadow” and some of the other “Piney Woods” horror stories. The subject of Howard’s views on “race” is certainly a touchy one and often evokes passionate responses on the part of his fans (see for example this 17-page thread from the official REH forums). Trying to decipher the personal views of someone who lived and died nearly a century before is always a dangerous game, even when one has access to numerous writings and personal correspondence. To paraphrase Mark Finn, Howard’s views on race were complicated. Whatever his personal views, it is undeniable that Howard, like many pulp writers (as well as creators from other media), did make use of a number of the often-demeaning racial stereotypes of his day.

In this article, Hoffman unflinchingly discusses one of these stereotypes — the sexually aggressive black male who lusts after white women — and looks at how Howard made use of it in certain of his stories in order to play on the fears of his readers. For Hoffman, the fear of miscegenation in white America was “at the root of horrific violence committed against blacks” (TDM 5.1, p. 8). This is something of a generalization, but there is probably a lot of truth there. Consider the incredible popularity of the film Birth of a Nation (1915), in which the ‘heroic’ Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of a helpless white woman in the clutches of a lustful black man, or the intense hatred directed at heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who dared to cross the color-line not only in the ring, but also in the bedroom.

(Continue reading this post)

Over on his Drums of Nyumbani blog, Charles R. Saunders has posted an entry entitled, “In Memoriam: Frank Frazetta.” Mr. Saunders reminisces about his discovery of Frazetta’s work, depictions of blacks in Frank’s art and also speculates about what a Frazetta cover for an Imaro novel might have looked like. CRS does an admirable job covering the latter two topics, but I have few more factoids and opinions to add. Feel free to click the link above, read the post and click back here.

(Continue reading this post)

Many thanks to Howardian scholar Paul Herman, who posted about this book on The Official Robert E. Howard Forum.

He noted that the two co-authors of the upcoming critical work More Than Human: The Evolutionary Heroes of Robert E. Howard, Justin Everett, Ph.D. and Deirdre Pettipiece, Ph.D. were “very serious REH fans, and serious academics, they have been promoting REH out there on the academic circuit” and has corresponded with both several times. They also will be presenting a panel at Howard Days next June.

Abstract:

Known best for the sword and sorcery stories he produced for the pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s, Robert E. Howard created a huge body of work that consisted of “around 3.5 million words” (Robert E. Howard Foundation, The Last of the Trunk), most of which focused on the creation of fantastic heroes of a depth and breadth unmatched by any writer before or since. Conan, King Kull, Solomon Kane and other complex characters populate civilizations Howard constructed and reconstructed in a wide-array of alternative worlds governed by competing principles of combat, survival, loyalty, and revenge. Tracing these heroes and the texts they occupy over the course of Howard’s interactions with evolutionary theories of human origin and behavior, Everett and Pettipiece reveal his dynamic and often conflicted engagement with ideas that changed the world. Howard’s interaction with the ideas of Darwin, Spencer, Freud and others who articulated fundamental principles of human behavior and social organization can be seen not only in the developing identities of his heroes, but also in the critical discussions he undertook with H.P. Lovecraft and other contemporaries. His intellectual engagement with some of the most important theories and philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries demonstrates that Howard and his body of work are sufficiently representative of important themes and tropes to recognize him as part of the American canon. This volume therefore addresses the gap in the critical discussion of American literary production of the first half of the 20th century by presenting Howard and his heroes and the evolution they both undertook over the course of his active career.

Brief table of contents:

1. Preface
2. Forward by Terence McVicker
3. Introduction: Why American Literary Studies Need Robert E. Howard
4. Chapter one: Early Influences and the Little Blue Books
5. Chapter two: Engaging with Ideas: What Howard Read and Its Impact on Howard’s Emerging Philosophy
6. Chapter three: Sex and Sinews: Sexual Selection, Secondary Sex Characteristics and Howard
7. Chapter four: Howard’s Men and Women and Their Potential Sources in Literature and Life
8. Chapter five: Isolation and Community, Civilization and Barbarism: Binary Forces in Howard’s fiction
9. Chapter seven: Conclusions and Continuing Questions

Approx. 350 pps, approx. $150.00 hardback. Publication by Edwin Mellen Press expected for late 2010. Robert E. Howard fan and bookseller Terence McVicker provides the foreword.

This book’s theme seems interesting, so it might be worth its — expensive — price. One can’t have enough serious literary criticism concerning Robert E. Howard’s œuvre.

We know a lot more about Robert E. Howard these days, and in particular we know a lot more truths about the man from Cross Plains than ever before. For this, we have many sources to thank, including the recent excellent work done by Rusty Burke in his A Short Biography and Mark Finn’s biographical work Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. There’s also plenty of places to find important critical analyses of Howard’s works, including collections of essays like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph.

But if you want to get a look inside Howard’s mind—how he thought, what he believed in passionately, and what he raged about—I can’t recommend The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard highly enough. Editor Rob Roehm deserves our utmost praise for putting together this three volume collection, available for purchase from The Robert E. Howard Foundation.

(Continue reading this post)

I’ve been reading a fair amount, here and there, about Robert E. Howard’s having been a racist. I’ve read someone’s opinion that he was an extreme one even by the standards of the 1930s. Now that I doubt. Certainly there are lines and statements in Howard’s stories (usually uttered by a character who naturally would say something like that; not nearly as often outside the dialogue, in REH’s own authorial voice) that I wouldn’t like if I was black. REH didn’t like such slurs, either — when similar things were said about the Irish.

I’m not sure I can contribute anything worth a damn to the discussion. I’m partisan for a start. I love REH’s stories and poetry, and I flinch at the thought of a fellow like that living out his days in an essentially anti-intellectual, racially biased, violent — and not infrequently murderous — environment. (It’s probably significant that his best-known and most evocative character, Conan, gets out of his dark, gloomy, savage homeland while still a young lad, adapts to civilization with all its failings, and never goes back.) So, emotionally, I’d prefer to defend REH than attack any day.

I’ve another misgiving, due to my not being native to Texas, or even the U.S.A. I’m Australian. Barging into this weblog and pontificating about racism (in the Lone Star State or any other) would surely lay me open to the rejoinder that we have a bad record in these matters Down Under. Ask any Aborigine.

Maybe I can provide a certain amount of perspective, though, from the former British Empire’s point of view, especially the English-speaking parts of it — Australia, Canada, and England itself. I’ll stick mainly to the attitudes reflected in popular adventure and thriller fiction. They reflect the attitudes of real people, including some highly-placed ones — who surely kicked back by the fire and read Rohmer, Sapper or Dennis Wheatley when they thought nobody was looking.

(Continue reading this post)

This is a saga, to be read round a fire against the lurking dark.

– Robert Low on The Whale Road

Most Robert E. Howard fans find a good Viking saga hard to resist. Many have delved into the treasures hoarded by H. Rider Haggard and Poul Anderson seeking the “Northern thing” that inspired Tolkien and sang with moody restlessness in the blood of Robert E. Howard.

All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood.

– To Harold Preece, ca. October 1930

Robert Low, right, lives his tales of the Oathsworn. His deep knowledge of his period gives his writing depth and power.

Scotsman Robert Low has written a saga worthy to stand with the greats of yore. The Whale Road launches the four-book Oathsworn series, which follows a band of Norse mercenaries through adventures across Europe and into Asia, from the market towns of Scandanavia to the steppes of Russia to the Great City of Constantinople, known to the Norse as Miklagard.

The saga follows the growth of Orm Rurikson from a green and fumbling youth into a seasoned fighter and leader of men.

(Continue reading this post)

On April 19th, George H. Scithers (pictured above, circa 2001) passed away. On April 20th, Damon Sasser wrote a post for the REHupa blog summarizing Scithers’ accomplishments in the fantasy/sci-fi field. Damon did a fine job and I see no real need to write another eulogy as such. I do, however, want to acknowledge the debt I owe Mr. Scithers. He and Amra, the fanzine he edited, had a profound effect on my reading choices these past thirty years or so.

(Continue reading this post)