‘Howard’s writing seems so highly charged with energy that it nearly gives off sparks’
—Stephen King
January 22, 1906: Robert Ervin Howard born in the fading ex-cowtown of Peaster, Texas, the only son of Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane (Ervin) Howard.
September 1919: After moving around the state and living briefly in a number of different locales, the family finally settles in the small oil boom town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, Texas. Howard would live there for the rest of his life.
1914: Howard starts attending school when he was eight. He was mostly self-educated and read voraciously, revealing in one letter: ‘In my passionate quest for reading material, nothing could have halted me but a bullet through the head.’
1921: Although Howard had written his first story – a historical adventure about a Viking named Boealf – at the age of nine or ten, and he was fifteen when he began writing professionally: ‘I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.’ He sent off his first effort to Adventure, but it was rejected, and it was another four years before Howard made his professional début in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.
1926: Howard graduates at the age of seventeen from Brownwood High School and, not being able to afford college, attends the Commercial School at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, where he studies non-credit courses in shorthand, typing, book-keeping and commercial law.
July 1925: Howard’s first story, ‘Spear and Fang’, written when he was just eighteen, is published in Weird Tales. The tale describes the struggles between prehistoric man, and he was paid a fee of $16.00 at the rate of half-a-cent a word.
August 1928: Howard’s first continuing character, the English Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane (actually created while he was still in high school), makes his debut in Weird Tales with the story ‘Red Shadows’. The author also began to sell other types of fiction – Westerns, sports stories, horror tales, true confessions, historical adventures and detective thrillers – to various pulp magazine markets, while at the same time he began to develop a series of characters with whom he would forever be identified with: Solomon Kane; the king of fabled Valusia, King Kull; Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn; prize-fighter Sailor Steve Costigan; Celtic warrior Turlogh O’Brien; soldier of fortune Francis X. Gordon, also known as ‘El Borak’; humorous hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins, and of course his most popular character – the mighty barbarian, Conan.
December 1932: The first published Conan story, ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, appears in Weird Tales. One of the final adventures in Conan’s chronology, this was, in fact, a reworking of an unsold King Kull tale entitled ‘By This Axe I Rule!’. According to his creator, Conan ‘. . . was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Conan, as a child, a desire to see them.’
