The boy willingly cooperated while, at the same time, developing a passionate interest in bodybuilding and boxing. She believed that he had it in him to be a writer someday. Robert was a clever boy who was influenced by his mother to read poetry and good literature. Father often lost money, falling for a variety of “get rich quick” schemes, while mother looked down on her husband as not being her intellectual equal. His father’s occupation – traveling physician – meant that the family would regularly travel from town to town. He was born Robert Ervin Howard in January 1906 in the small town of Peaster, Texas and lived all of his life in the State. His fertile imagination created characters like Conan the Cimmerian (also known as the Barbarian) and he followed this with many others that belong to what is now known as the “sword and sorcery” regime. He did not, of course, know at the time that he had only a few more years to live. He deemed them “a luxury he could not afford” and decided, from about 1930 onwards, to concentrate his efforts on his short story form of writing.
Many were published in poetry journals such as “Weird Tales” but, even there, his poems contained subject matter that did not appeal much to readers. He was an American writer of fictional novels but he also dabbled in fantastical poetry, sometimes in standard verse but also in “prose” form. Robert E Howard was, in his very short life time, responsible for the creation of pulp fiction characters that are still “alive” today, over seventy years after he created them.
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