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.

He has written for or edited The Dark Barbarian: The Writings of Robert E. Howard (1984), the five-volume Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick (1991-1997), The Barbaric Triumph: A Critical Anthology on the Writings of Robert E. Howard (2004) and The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook (2009).

On a more personal note: his 1976 essay “Conan vs Conantics” was a kind of revelation to me. Every Howard fan can — and, in this blogger’s opinion, should if it hasn’t already been done yet – read it thanks to the Web Archive link that I just provided. It opened my eyes in regards to Lyon Sprague de Camp‘s editorial shenaningans when I first stumbled upon it a decade ago.

Damon C. Sasser, REHupan and head of TGR, has recently written a blog on Don Herron’s nomination. Here are some of his kind words:

Much like Hammett’s Continental Op, he is always one step of everyone else and on the cutting edge of literary discoveries and criticism.

The winner of the Munsey Award will be announced next month, during Pulpfest 2010.