The Famous Author Who Thought His Stories Were Junk

Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the barbarian, didn’t give himself enough credit as a writer.

Yeah, he created Conan the Barbarian in the 1920s.  Yeah, people still read his pulp stories almost 100 years after they were published.  But Howard didn’t know that his stories were going to be republished after his death (which I won’t delve into here).  And he also didn’t know Conan was going to become so popular decades later with comic books and movies based on his character.

In a letter to famous author H.P. Lovecraft in 1933, Robert E. Howard described how he thought of himself as a writer . 

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“But I was the first writer of the post oak country; my work’s lack of merit cannot erase that fact.  By first, I do not, of course, mean in point of excellence, God knows; I mean in point of time.  There are some real writers growing up in this country now, whose work will be read and applauded long after my junk has passed to the oblivion it will earn.”

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If you want to read the entire letter, here it is.

I can understand where Robert E. Howard was coming from.  He was writing for pulp magazines.  The magazines were made out of cheap newsprint and would fall apart within months if not handled carefully.  Howard was reasonable in his expectation that his stories would pass into oblivion; the pulp paper would disintegrate, and his stories would fade away both literally and figuratively.

When critics complain about Howard’s sometimes sloppy prose, they aren’t considering (or don’t care) that he was writing for pulps, not for literary magazines.  Compared to most pulp content, Robert E. Howard’s stories were literary fiction.  

Some readers credit Robert E. Howard with creating the genre (or sub genre) of sword and sorcery.  I don’t know if he ‘created’ it, and I don’t really care.  All I know is that if somebody reads the stories you wrote a hundred years after you wrote them, then your stories probably aren’t junk.

But I guess there wasn’t any way for Robert E. Howard to have known that… unless he had decided to live longer… but I don’t want to delve into that here.