The Works of Robert E. Howard
5 total works
Robert E. Howard turned to writing comic and dialect Western tales only late in his career, but he found an immediate and continuously successful market for them, and they are in many respects his most accomplished and polished works. The sixteen tales collected here are some of the best of his stories, featuring Breckinridge Elkins, Pike Bearfield, and Buckner J. Grimes-three inimitable characters who lead well-intentioned lives of perpetual confusion, mischance, and outright catastrophe. Fifteen of the stories were published between 1934 and 1937 in Action Stories, Argosy, or Cowboy Stories; the other remained unpublished for more than thirty years. Many of these stories were rewritten for book publication and have never been reprinted in their original form. They are reminiscent of traditional southwestern tall tales, told in dialect, featuring larger-than-life characters, swift action, broad satire, and wry humor.
Although he is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian and as a writer of historical fiction and fantasy, Robert E. Howard was both a successful author of popular boxing stories and an avid amateur boxer himself. The sixteen stories and three poems collected in this volume show the full range of his talents for action, humor, and fistic philosophy. Ten of the stories feature the sailor Steve Costigan, a lovable, hard-fisted, and innocent semipro pugilist, who takes on dastardly villains in exotic ports of call. Howard's brilliant blue-collar humor belies his preoccupation with the real-life issues near and dear to his heart-death, honor, pride, and a man's love for his dog Other stories are more dramatic and somber, including "Iron Men," which Howard called "the best fight story I ever wrote-in many ways the best story of any kind I ever wrote." Severely edited and truncated for its original publication in 1930 in Fight Stories magazine, the tale has never been published in its original form-until now. It appears here, completely restored from Howard's original typescript, in an authoritative version that Howard fans everywhere will appreciate.
In these stories Howard created a realistic, richly populated boxing universe, with intertwining characters and histories that carry on from tale to tale. With them he takes his place in a tradition of American boxing writers but always with a uniquely Howardian twist, a gritty brooding atmosphere, and a reserve of humor that captures the often brutal ambiance of the 1930s.
In these stories Howard created a realistic, richly populated boxing universe, with intertwining characters and histories that carry on from tale to tale. With them he takes his place in a tradition of American boxing writers but always with a uniquely Howardian twist, a gritty brooding atmosphere, and a reserve of humor that captures the often brutal ambiance of the 1930s.
Robert E. Howard is celebrated as the founding father of sword-and-sorcery, the creator of Conan of Cimmeria and Kull of Atlantis. The Black Stranger and Other American Tales demonstrates that in some of his most powerful heroic fantasy and horror stories, he also explored a New World older and more haunted than that which we've seen in textbooks or museum exhibits. In Howard's Gothic America, dominion goes hand in hand with damnation and the present never ceases to writhe in the grip of the past. "The Black Stranger" spearheads the collection. Located at the extreme edge of Hyborian geography and human ruthlessness, this Conan novella has seldom been available until now. All of the Cimmerian's lethal skills may not be enough inside a stockade that shelters a self-exiled, pirate-plagued count, besieged from without and bedeviled from within. Against the backdrop of a demonically hostile dreadwood, Howard recreates the worst nightmares of the earliest European invaders of North America. In the tales that follow, Howard unearths sinister civilizations that have forgotten the mysteries of their origins on American soil tens of thousands of years ago.
That soil is a dark and bloody ground, beneath which the monstrous heirs of ancient wrongs and unsuspected wars wait. A Comanche champion and a lone conquistador stumble upon empires carved out of the primordial Southwest by necromancers. Hot hate given cold flesh lurches on zuvembie legs in "Pigeons from Hell" and lurks in the shuddersome swamps of the Deep South in "Black Canaan." These stories, here refurbished with authoritative, unexpurgated texts, have transcended the Thirties pulps in which they first saw print. With their unflinching focus on original American sin and even more original sinners, some are sure to take their place next to dark classics like "Young Goodman Brown," "Benito Cereno," and "A Rose for Emily."
That soil is a dark and bloody ground, beneath which the monstrous heirs of ancient wrongs and unsuspected wars wait. A Comanche champion and a lone conquistador stumble upon empires carved out of the primordial Southwest by necromancers. Hot hate given cold flesh lurches on zuvembie legs in "Pigeons from Hell" and lurks in the shuddersome swamps of the Deep South in "Black Canaan." These stories, here refurbished with authoritative, unexpurgated texts, have transcended the Thirties pulps in which they first saw print. With their unflinching focus on original American sin and even more original sinners, some are sure to take their place next to dark classics like "Young Goodman Brown," "Benito Cereno," and "A Rose for Emily."
Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient
by Robert E Howard
Published 1 April 2005
For five centuries of Crusades, European armies of believers, fanatics, and mercenaries warred with the followers of the Prophet for control of Asia Minor and Palestine. From Jerusalem to Vienna, the frontier between West and East saw battle and bloodshed, treachery and butchery on a scale hitherto unknown and unimagined. The pageantry of medieval knighthood, the exoticism of the Orient, the ferocity of the invaders from the steppes, the mysteries of the seraglio, the rise and fall of great dynasties-these provided a real historical backdrop for some of Robert E. Howard's greatest fiction. This volume contains the complete Oriental stories by the creator of Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane. Some were published in Farnsworth Wright's Oriental Stories between 1930 and 1934; others were left unpublished and are printed here in authoritative texts based on the author's surviving typescripts; and still others, left unfinished at his death, are presented as suggestive evidence of the work he had yet to do. As this collection attests, no one else writes action stories with Howard's fast-paced intensity or brooding moral outlook.
Here, the fates of empires rest on the swords of exiles, vagabonds, and renegades; whether civilization will be annihilated by religious zealots or by bloodthirsty barbarians, who is to say?
Here, the fates of empires rest on the swords of exiles, vagabonds, and renegades; whether civilization will be annihilated by religious zealots or by bloodthirsty barbarians, who is to say?
"I was born in the little ex-cowtown of Peaster [Texas]," Robert E. Howard wrote to a friend, and the first story he ever published (in 1922) was a Western sketch. Although he went on to write hundreds of fantasy tales set in Conan's Hyborian kingdoms, Kull's ancient Atlantis, and Solomon Kane's darkest Africa, his heart always remained in the West. In 1929 he began publishing Western tales, but they were unlike any the genre had ever seen-they didn't have happy endings or perfect heroes. They were grimmer, more action packed, even cataclysmically violent. Howard was fascinated by outlaws and gunmen, especially those who "crossed over" to become lawmen, and he knew and interviewed many "old-timers-old law officers, trail drivers, cattlemen, buffalo hunters, and pioneers." The twelve stories collected here show a West stripped down to essentials, where internalized codes of personal honor, loyalty, and courage matter more than laws, progress, or civilization. Also included are four articles, suggestive of his wide-ranging interests-from Billy the Kid to the eerie and unexplained happenings on the frontier.
"To me the annals of the land pulse with blood and life," Howard wrote, and his Western stories are full of memorable characters, heart-pounding action, and the distinctive prose generations of fans have come to know, and expect, and appreciate.
"To me the annals of the land pulse with blood and life," Howard wrote, and his Western stories are full of memorable characters, heart-pounding action, and the distinctive prose generations of fans have come to know, and expect, and appreciate.