The Unknown Author.

For this posting, I'd like to discuss an peculiar literary phenomenon: an almost completely unknown author whose work is famous - specifically, Robert E. Howard.

Born in the small Texas town of Peaster on January 22, 1906, Howard wrote primarily in the niche markets of Western stories and "weird" fantasy tales, where he enjoyed a certain degree of success. His literary creations included Bran Mak Morn, the dour ruler of the Picts during the time of the Roman rule over Briton; the equally dour Elizabethan hero Solomon Kane; the villainous Skull-Face; the bumbling, battling Western strongman Breckenridge Elkins, and many others.

Howard's writing career might have transcended his pulp magazine roots, given time. However, this was not to be. On June 11th, 1936, in a fit of depression over the death of his mother earlier the same day, he took his own life with a .380 Colt automatic.

Now, tragic though Howard's short life appears, at this point I can almost hear the non-fans in the audience saying "So?" Ah, but if I'd started the biography by saying "Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian..."

The route by which Howard's raven-haired, grim-faced Cimmerian hero was separated from his creator is an odd one. During his writing career, Howard completed 20 short stories that featured Conan as their protagonist, along with one novel-length piece called The Hour of the Dragon, which originally appeared as a 5-part serial in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936.

Following his death, Howard's work might well have sunk into obscurity. However, the enormously successful United States paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ballantine Books in 1965* created a marketplace for fantasy material, one which publishers were eager to satisfy by releasing fantasy stories from any source available.

Perhaps too eager - the twelve Lancer/Ace** editions of the Conan stories, as "edited" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, represent a bizarre combination of content. In addition to including Howard's original Conan tales, de Camp and Carter completed unfinished pieces, wrote new stories based on outlines found in Howard's papers, and took existing Howard stories with other characters and rewrote them as Conan stories. (To illustrate this, imagine someone rewriting Dickens' Great Expectations with Ebeneezer Scrooge as the main character simply because A Christmas Carol has better sales in bookstores.)

The strange thing is that both de Camp and Carter were relatively successful with their own material, and as such one would expect that professional courtesy would make them reluctant to take such enormous liberties with another author's legacy. What's even worse is that the de Camp/Carter stories don't measure up to Howard's flair for sword and sorcery. I first read the collections in the mid-70's, and even at the age of 14 I was aware that some of the material lacked the same energy and excitement that distinguished the original work.

However odd these blends of original creation and poor imitation may have been, the Lancer/Ace Conans proved to be popular, and made fantasy artist Frank Frazetta famous for the cover paintings that he produced for the series. Based on this success, in 1970 Marvel Comics writer Roy Thomas convinced his reluctant employers to depart from their usual superhero model and try a comic based on the character of Conan. To Marvel's surprise, Conan The Barbarian proved to be a hit, and spawned another title, The Savage Sword of Conan, along with a daily newspaper strip.

The various comic versions helped to make Conan even more a part of popular culture. Finally, Dino di Laurentiis' movie adaptations, Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984, made Conan the Barbarian a household name - but not Robert E. Howard.

At the current point in time, Robert E. Howard's name has almost ceased to be connected to his creation. There are over 50 Conan novels written by authors other than Howard on bookstore shelves, comic book fans associate the name Conan with Roy Thomas, and the character is almost a joke to most of the world, thanks to Governor Schwarzenegger's portrayal of Conan in the movie versions.

And what do I think Robert E. Howard's reaction would be, faced with a small army of opportunists making a living off his original idea? To quote the man himself:

"I am aware of an almost overpowering desire to spring from my chair and kick someone violently in the pants."

- Sid

* I'm going to ignore any possible influence from the unauthorized, no-royalities-paid US publication of The Lord of the Rings by Ace Books earlier in the same year, which Tolkien successfully urged his fans to boycott. The Ace editor responsible for this pirated version was Donald A. Wollheim, who was himself a science fiction author and should have known better.

** Lancer Books went bankrupt before the publication of the 12th collection. Subsequently Prestige took over the series, publishing the 12th collection and reprinting the others, but since Prestige was distributed by Ace Books, they're commonly referred to as the Lancer/Ace editions. Well, perhaps not "commonly", but you get the idea.



UPDATE:  MARCH 2013
I've closed comments for this posting, due to an recent attack of spam comments that's been dumping 40 or 50 garbage e-mails into my account every day for most of this month.