Good post. The one thing missing is crediting Howard with the invention of something so compelling, out of his own youthful fervor and earnestness, that he created an entire genre which has lived on and ramified into countless stories over nearly a century. Howard was a supernova of creative energy, he burst into the world with something unique and powerful. There are very few writers who can claim to have created a genre, but he did. And, poignantly, he did it alone, in a small town where he was considered a freak, with almost no moral support or understanding, except from his pen pals, especially H.P. Lovecraft, who saw and cultivated Howard's unique creative spark.
Also: "Usually at the first introduction of a woman, there’s a long passage where the narrator tries to convey that she is extremely hot." Howard was a young man who had one girlfriend ever, and that was a chaste relationship. It is virtually certain he died a virgin. His writing about women is unmixed with any knowledge of real love or intimacy with a real women. It is adolescent dreaming of an ideal woman. And it is not just lust, it is the desire for companionship and loyalty. Belit returns from the dead to save Conan because of her invincible love for him. She is not just "hot" -- of course she is -- but Howard was dreaming of more than that, and that guileless romanticism is what makes those passages so moving.
One other detail. During the Depression, when people were starving, Howard was making a decent living off of his typewriter, which his neighbors in Cross Plains, Texas could hardly believe. His stories were popular and in demand in the pulp magazines where he published. He was a professional who bashed out the work and got paid for it.
Recommended: The Whole Wide World. 1996 film about the unlikely romance between Texas schoolteacher Novalyne Price and pulp writer Robert E. Howard. With Vincent D’Onofrio and Renée Zellweger. One of Zellweger’s greatest performances; she’s spoken about how connected she felt to Price and really leans into her Texas-ness in a way you don’t see in her better-known roles. Based on Price’s memoir.
I read a lot of the Conan stories in my teens, but have never come back to them. I thought your point (taken from the volume you read - but you don't mention the author!) about Conan being a hard-boiled detective hero transferred to a fantasy world was acute - and it made me think of perhaps Conan's most obvious heir today: namely Jack Reacher. Lee Child's writing is more streamlined and less overwrought than Howard's, and they aren't racist, but there is the same power-fantasy element to them, and the same way that the hero manages to hook up with hot women on a regular basis. But even more than that, there's the idea of someone effectively living the life of a barbarian in a civilized world - someone with no doubts, no hidden flaws and traumas to overcome, who can just drift from place to place without attachments using his strength and skill to solve other people's problems for them.
I've no idea whether Lee Child was consciously influenced by Conan when he created Jack Reacher, but the books seem to come out of a very similar sensibility, and to appeal to a similar audience. And - you know, maybe they aren't "Literature", but I find them a gripping read, much as I did with Conan all those years ago!
Yes, absolutely! The power fantasy of most cop fiction today is the fantasy that the world works like it should -- that justice is done, that cops are the good guys (despite all the stuff you see on the news) & that the bad guy always goes to jail.
For that, most popular fiction is popular because it scratches some sort of itch. I work at a library, and solidly 60-70% of adult fiction readers are primarily reading romance or crime/mystery fiction. The fantasy underpinning romance is -- I don't want to imply there's nothing to explore there, but -- obvious, at least compared to crime fiction. But crime fiction is certainly a fantasy as well. It's concerned at least in part with the question "how can humans do this?", but offers a degree of metaphysical certainty in its answer. They can do "it" because xyz... and they will be stopped.
Weird Tales has been pretty successfully resurrected (in the Lovecraftian vein) as a literary horror journal that consistently publishes the best writers in the horror and weird fiction fields: https://www.weirdtales.com/
There is a large and vibrant market for genre short fiction today. It's certainly not lucrative, but it still exists. Pulp stories never really went away. They just became more literary.
Weird Tales has come and gone many times in my writing career. I submitted to them when they were edited by Darrell Schweitzer, then by Ann Vandermeer and later when they were under Warren Lapine. It's never really seemed to have even the cultural relevance, during my life, that the other sci-fi journals had, much less what it had during its first incarnation.
I didn't mean to suggest that the current iteration of Weird Tales has anything like the readership or cultural relevance it once did, just noting that it's still around. It’s also much more horror-focused now, since Jonathan Maberry has been editing. I have no idea how well it sells, though they consistently publish some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction (Stephen Graham Jones, Ramsey Campbell, Gabino Iglesias, Gwendolyn Kiste, Cynthia Pelayo, etc.) and their Facebook page has 1.3 million followers (not that that necessarily means anything, though it's a hell of a lot of followers for a genre publication). They also have a deal with Blackstone Audio to produce audiobook editions of each issue, which are quite good! I own a few.
One thing I’ve noticed doing publicity and following the awards circuit for WE MOSTLY COME OUT AT NIGHT is that the horror community feels pretty siloed from the rest of speculative fiction. Though there are a handful of writers who seem to move freely between the two, for the most part it feels like there’s a pretty impermeable wall (of indifference) separating genres that get filed under the speculative umbrella. I’ll be interested to see what your take on Lovecraft is. I think it’s pretty inarguable that despite his many failings as a writer and a human being, his work is vastly more relevant today than Howard’s, specifically in the horror community, but also in the culture at large.
Excellent piece and I agree with most of your analysis. With regard to Howard's views on race, he was of course a southerner of his time, but I'd argue that he has plenty of strong heroic characters from various racial backgrounds. If you had a strong sword-arm, you were OK in Howard's book. One of his best horror stories is a revenge fantasy of slaves against slaveholders, as I recall. By the standards of his time his stories are highly multicultural and he was relatively enlightened compared to many, I would argue, including Lovecraft.
This is an aside, but I'd also take issue with the characterization of the racial politics of the Rocky movies. In the first film, Apollo Creed is presented as classy, witty, intelligent, and a good role model who is very likeable. He is somewhat less sympathetic in the second film, by which time one of Rocky's trainers is black, but still relatable and not a villain. In the third movie, Clubber Lang is black and more of a pure villain but this time Rocky and Apollo become best friends as Rocky trains with Apollo's all-black corner. In the fourth and fifth films the primary antagonist is white but Rocky still has Apollo's old trainer in his corner. In the sixth film the black antagonist is presented very sympathetically and Rocky mentors a biracial teenager. I don't think it's fair to suggest any of those movies were engaging in racial dogwhistles.
The Rocky movies are my favorite films. And everyone loves Apollo Creed--that is exactly why the movies get a pass on the weird race stuff going on ;) Just like Conan does, Rocky does it in a good natured enough way that you're not even certain if it's offensive or not. But this fantasy, of a great white hope in boxing, is a recognizable racial fantasy that has captivated white Americans for decades! For almost a century--a white man who can go toe to toe with black men and physically dominate them. It's a fantasy Apollo recognized --it is exactly why he gives Rocky a title shot in the first place--and is a recognizable subtext to the film
The Rockys are my favorite films as well. Which may I ask is your second favorite in the series, following the original of course?
I see what you're saying, but the fact that it's explicitly called out as a marketing gimmick and that Rocky is visibly offended by the racist bartender complicates and/or subverts that fantasy. By the standards of 1977 cinema the film goes out of its way to be anti-racist. Plus Rocky Marciano hadn't been *that* long before, there were still many burly white ethnics who became professional boxers in the '60s and '70s.
Interestingly, the movie as written as of the start of shooting had a significant subplot involving the boxer Dipper who got Rocky's locker at Mick's gym. ("I dig your locker, man!") Basically Dipper as the fighter on the rise with the better record had a more legitimate claim to fighting Apollo if it was going to be a Philadelphia small-timer, and was very resentful of Rocky getting picked for being the white guy with the charming nickname. As I recall, he picked a fight with Rocky during training and then got knocked out. There are photos from the set of that being shot with the director John Avildsen frowning as he determined the subplot was a distraction from the Capra-esque nature of the rest of the script.
This weekend, as it happens, I was reading Samuel Delany on Alyx and his essay has a lot of general observations about sword & sorcery… if people enjoyed this post I would recommend it! It's in the collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.
Reminds me I need to read Alyx… On the BDM-beat, I would love to read your (Naomi’s) take on the Weird Tales stories by C.L. Moore, who, in her best work (which is a lot of it), combined the best qualities of Howard and Lovecraft.
The clichés in Howard’s Conan stories seem to me not so much a mark of bad writing (although he was writing at speed, and frequently did write pretty badly), as a reflection of the earnestness you speak of. Cleverness and irony would get in the way of the warrior virtues Conan embodies.
As for his racism, I do think it’s qualitatively different from Lovecraft’s. Lovecraft is one of the few white supremacists I’ve come across that I think actually suffered from racism as a disease, as opposed to an ideology a white person adopts, consciously or not, because it offers that white person psychological, social, or emotional advantages. I think that when Lovecraft walked down the street and saw a person of African descent he probably was seized with a psychologically debilitating horror. It might be a condition that results from privilege, but it strikes me as a genuine affliction for Lovecraft, a phobia that probably prevented him from navigating multiethnic spaces the same way agoraphobia would prevent one from strolling through a field.
Howard’s racism seems of a type that can no longer exist in our culture. (Not that racism no longer exists! But in different forms from Howard’s.) As an autodidact, I bet he had gone to the Cross Plains, Texas library and read lots of books on, say, anthropology. But those books (many of which would have been published, say, twenty years earlier, around 1900) would have been works of Social Darwinism, scientifically “proving” the superiority of white people. When Howard mouths those old saws, he’s just “trusting the science,” as we say nowadays.
I imagine he might never have met a black person who’d had the opportunity to receive an education; having only met uneducated black people, it would be natural for him to think of black people as uneducated. Although he might have read the speeches of Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, that wouldn’t have the impact of seeing filmed speeches by Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or a performance by Poitier, or any of the thousands of examples that surround us of undeniably witty, articulate, intelligent black people that our mass culture offers us, even if you grow up in some ultra-white pocket of the country.
If Robert Howard were brought forward to 2025 and spent a few months in our world, I like to think he would revise his racist opinions without feeling particularly traumatized in his identity as a white man. He did have racist opinions, but he didn’t have skin in that game, so to speak, in the same sense Lovecraft or David Duke, for example.
As for his depictions of women, it’s true; they’re awkward. I find myself preferring Howard stories where there are no women, like “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” because their ability to slice the heads off of pirates without ever mussing their lipstick gets hard to take. That’s not just a Howard thing. His contemporary Catherine Moore also published sword-and-sorcery in Weird Tales; her recurring heroine was Jirel of Joiry. (My eight-year-old has been made to periodically sit through the audiobook reading of the Jirel story “The Black God’s Kiss” since he was about five.) Jirel is awesome in the same way as Conan, but it’s clear from the descriptions that she also is unbelievably hot. Surreal moments arise when she will be, say, chomping on a leg of mutton and wiping the grease off her mouth with the back of her hand, and yet it’s clear from the descriptions of her full red sensual crimson lips that she must be wearing lipstick. She’s an armor-clad swordswoman who’s a match for any man-at-arms, but without any unsightly upper-body muscularity that would interrupt the line of her delicately slender form. Folks in that scene just couldn’t figure out how to write women, even when they were women.
Finally, speaking of sleazy covers, I’ve heard the cover artist Margaret Brundage occasionally referred to as “Margaret Bondage.”
I agree about Lovecraft. "Racist" doesn't begin to cover it. He didn't seem to like even other white people unless they came from the same part of England as his ancestors. But that very Xenophobia made his Fear of The Alien Other descriptions compelling.
Howard was more just a product of his time. Many early progressives shared such racial attitudes.
This was wonderful! I haven't read a ton of Conan, but what I have read I've enjoyed, very much for the reasons you cite. I first read him as an adult -- Conan the Conqueror (a retitling of "The Hour of the Dragon") in an Ace Double (backed with one of Leigh Brackett's very best stories, "The Sword of Rhiannon".)
(Those covers are definitely by Margaret Brundage, by the way. And while Weird Tales certainly had financial issues with there "low" circulation of maybe 50,000 -- the SF/Fantasy/Horror magazines of today would kill for a circulation that high!)
I am very much looking forward to your story later this week.
Speaking of Johnny Weissmuller, I highly recommend this poem about him by the late Clive James, which I think gets to the heart of the appeal of the white barbarian figure, who is both alien and relatable:
Really great read! My wife's uncle collected Conan comics, so our family is nostalgic for that kind of pulp. I'm excited to dive into your recommendations.
Get excited about Lovecraft. My essential reads for him to get started:
"However, the pulps have one advantage over these other categories, especially over the slicks, in that they gave rise to an intense fan culture."
This started with Hugo Gernsback, who regularly formed fan clubs for all his magazines and published reader letters, with addresses, which allowed them to contact one another and meet up in real life, leading eventually to conventions.
I never knew there was so much to Conan! But then my image of him is solely based on the film and Arnie—I've never seen any of the original print versions.
And I'm now wondering how far these pulps penetrated the UK market—as a kid growing up in the 60s I was aware of imported comics like Superman, and when my pocket money would stretch occasionally bought one (to my Mum's disapproval).
Also wondering whether the slick/highbrow/pulp categories were replicated here.
I won't admit how many volumes of the collected Savage Sword of Conan I've read, but it's well over a dozen. Incredibly consistent quality for year after year, too.
Watched Conan the Destroyer (1984) recently on one of the streamers. Don’t think I had ever seen it. It’s the second of the Conan movies. Not terrible, but not good either. Not sure that Wilt Chamberlain added much, although Grace Jones was fun to watch, and Olivia d’Abo was pretty good in her role. Some truly phony-looking special effects. About as good as can be expected for a sequel, I suppose, but, really, given full access to Howard’s works, I’m pretty sure just about anyone could have come up with a better storyline.
Maybe these stories work better in the world of the imagination than on the screen. About the only thing that translates well is the physicality of Conan. If you look at the famous Frank Frazetta covers for the early Conan reprints, that’s basically Arnie you’re looking at, it seems to me.
This Frank Frazetta documentary talks about how much trouble De Laurentis went to in the first film to translate Frazetta's paintings to the screen, shot for shot.
According to every con panel I've ever been to, those covers were what sold the Conan books off the spinner racks in the 50s and 60s. Lots of knock-off authors as well.
The first thing that leapt into my mind as I read this was that it sounds a lot like a modern (?) Cuhuliann, of Irish folk story fame. Not absolutely sure that that fits but it sure feels like it. Same super-macho hero type, same low-brow audience (even centuries apart). Wonder if there's a link. Anyone know more about that possibility??
Good post. The one thing missing is crediting Howard with the invention of something so compelling, out of his own youthful fervor and earnestness, that he created an entire genre which has lived on and ramified into countless stories over nearly a century. Howard was a supernova of creative energy, he burst into the world with something unique and powerful. There are very few writers who can claim to have created a genre, but he did. And, poignantly, he did it alone, in a small town where he was considered a freak, with almost no moral support or understanding, except from his pen pals, especially H.P. Lovecraft, who saw and cultivated Howard's unique creative spark.
Also: "Usually at the first introduction of a woman, there’s a long passage where the narrator tries to convey that she is extremely hot." Howard was a young man who had one girlfriend ever, and that was a chaste relationship. It is virtually certain he died a virgin. His writing about women is unmixed with any knowledge of real love or intimacy with a real women. It is adolescent dreaming of an ideal woman. And it is not just lust, it is the desire for companionship and loyalty. Belit returns from the dead to save Conan because of her invincible love for him. She is not just "hot" -- of course she is -- but Howard was dreaming of more than that, and that guileless romanticism is what makes those passages so moving.
One other detail. During the Depression, when people were starving, Howard was making a decent living off of his typewriter, which his neighbors in Cross Plains, Texas could hardly believe. His stories were popular and in demand in the pulp magazines where he published. He was a professional who bashed out the work and got paid for it.
Fantastic additional context, thank you!
Recommended: The Whole Wide World. 1996 film about the unlikely romance between Texas schoolteacher Novalyne Price and pulp writer Robert E. Howard. With Vincent D’Onofrio and Renée Zellweger. One of Zellweger’s greatest performances; she’s spoken about how connected she felt to Price and really leans into her Texas-ness in a way you don’t see in her better-known roles. Based on Price’s memoir.
A third vote! Absolutely love this movie!
I second this! Worth watching and returning to now and then.
I read a lot of the Conan stories in my teens, but have never come back to them. I thought your point (taken from the volume you read - but you don't mention the author!) about Conan being a hard-boiled detective hero transferred to a fantasy world was acute - and it made me think of perhaps Conan's most obvious heir today: namely Jack Reacher. Lee Child's writing is more streamlined and less overwrought than Howard's, and they aren't racist, but there is the same power-fantasy element to them, and the same way that the hero manages to hook up with hot women on a regular basis. But even more than that, there's the idea of someone effectively living the life of a barbarian in a civilized world - someone with no doubts, no hidden flaws and traumas to overcome, who can just drift from place to place without attachments using his strength and skill to solve other people's problems for them.
I've no idea whether Lee Child was consciously influenced by Conan when he created Jack Reacher, but the books seem to come out of a very similar sensibility, and to appeal to a similar audience. And - you know, maybe they aren't "Literature", but I find them a gripping read, much as I did with Conan all those years ago!
Yes, absolutely! The power fantasy of most cop fiction today is the fantasy that the world works like it should -- that justice is done, that cops are the good guys (despite all the stuff you see on the news) & that the bad guy always goes to jail.
For that, most popular fiction is popular because it scratches some sort of itch. I work at a library, and solidly 60-70% of adult fiction readers are primarily reading romance or crime/mystery fiction. The fantasy underpinning romance is -- I don't want to imply there's nothing to explore there, but -- obvious, at least compared to crime fiction. But crime fiction is certainly a fantasy as well. It's concerned at least in part with the question "how can humans do this?", but offers a degree of metaphysical certainty in its answer. They can do "it" because xyz... and they will be stopped.
Weird Tales has been pretty successfully resurrected (in the Lovecraftian vein) as a literary horror journal that consistently publishes the best writers in the horror and weird fiction fields: https://www.weirdtales.com/
There is a large and vibrant market for genre short fiction today. It's certainly not lucrative, but it still exists. Pulp stories never really went away. They just became more literary.
Weird Tales has come and gone many times in my writing career. I submitted to them when they were edited by Darrell Schweitzer, then by Ann Vandermeer and later when they were under Warren Lapine. It's never really seemed to have even the cultural relevance, during my life, that the other sci-fi journals had, much less what it had during its first incarnation.
I didn't mean to suggest that the current iteration of Weird Tales has anything like the readership or cultural relevance it once did, just noting that it's still around. It’s also much more horror-focused now, since Jonathan Maberry has been editing. I have no idea how well it sells, though they consistently publish some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction (Stephen Graham Jones, Ramsey Campbell, Gabino Iglesias, Gwendolyn Kiste, Cynthia Pelayo, etc.) and their Facebook page has 1.3 million followers (not that that necessarily means anything, though it's a hell of a lot of followers for a genre publication). They also have a deal with Blackstone Audio to produce audiobook editions of each issue, which are quite good! I own a few.
One thing I’ve noticed doing publicity and following the awards circuit for WE MOSTLY COME OUT AT NIGHT is that the horror community feels pretty siloed from the rest of speculative fiction. Though there are a handful of writers who seem to move freely between the two, for the most part it feels like there’s a pretty impermeable wall (of indifference) separating genres that get filed under the speculative umbrella. I’ll be interested to see what your take on Lovecraft is. I think it’s pretty inarguable that despite his many failings as a writer and a human being, his work is vastly more relevant today than Howard’s, specifically in the horror community, but also in the culture at large.
Excellent piece and I agree with most of your analysis. With regard to Howard's views on race, he was of course a southerner of his time, but I'd argue that he has plenty of strong heroic characters from various racial backgrounds. If you had a strong sword-arm, you were OK in Howard's book. One of his best horror stories is a revenge fantasy of slaves against slaveholders, as I recall. By the standards of his time his stories are highly multicultural and he was relatively enlightened compared to many, I would argue, including Lovecraft.
This is an aside, but I'd also take issue with the characterization of the racial politics of the Rocky movies. In the first film, Apollo Creed is presented as classy, witty, intelligent, and a good role model who is very likeable. He is somewhat less sympathetic in the second film, by which time one of Rocky's trainers is black, but still relatable and not a villain. In the third movie, Clubber Lang is black and more of a pure villain but this time Rocky and Apollo become best friends as Rocky trains with Apollo's all-black corner. In the fourth and fifth films the primary antagonist is white but Rocky still has Apollo's old trainer in his corner. In the sixth film the black antagonist is presented very sympathetically and Rocky mentors a biracial teenager. I don't think it's fair to suggest any of those movies were engaging in racial dogwhistles.
The Rocky movies are my favorite films. And everyone loves Apollo Creed--that is exactly why the movies get a pass on the weird race stuff going on ;) Just like Conan does, Rocky does it in a good natured enough way that you're not even certain if it's offensive or not. But this fantasy, of a great white hope in boxing, is a recognizable racial fantasy that has captivated white Americans for decades! For almost a century--a white man who can go toe to toe with black men and physically dominate them. It's a fantasy Apollo recognized --it is exactly why he gives Rocky a title shot in the first place--and is a recognizable subtext to the film
The Rockys are my favorite films as well. Which may I ask is your second favorite in the series, following the original of course?
I see what you're saying, but the fact that it's explicitly called out as a marketing gimmick and that Rocky is visibly offended by the racist bartender complicates and/or subverts that fantasy. By the standards of 1977 cinema the film goes out of its way to be anti-racist. Plus Rocky Marciano hadn't been *that* long before, there were still many burly white ethnics who became professional boxers in the '60s and '70s.
Interestingly, the movie as written as of the start of shooting had a significant subplot involving the boxer Dipper who got Rocky's locker at Mick's gym. ("I dig your locker, man!") Basically Dipper as the fighter on the rise with the better record had a more legitimate claim to fighting Apollo if it was going to be a Philadelphia small-timer, and was very resentful of Rocky getting picked for being the white guy with the charming nickname. As I recall, he picked a fight with Rocky during training and then got knocked out. There are photos from the set of that being shot with the director John Avildsen frowning as he determined the subplot was a distraction from the Capra-esque nature of the rest of the script.
This weekend, as it happens, I was reading Samuel Delany on Alyx and his essay has a lot of general observations about sword & sorcery… if people enjoyed this post I would recommend it! It's in the collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw.
Reminds me I need to read Alyx… On the BDM-beat, I would love to read your (Naomi’s) take on the Weird Tales stories by C.L. Moore, who, in her best work (which is a lot of it), combined the best qualities of Howard and Lovecraft.
I rec the LoA Russ book for Alyx because there’s an Alyx story in it that doesn’t usually get collected with the others
I’ll pick that up! I lost Female Man in a move years ago, it will be good to rectify that
I love Conan.
The clichés in Howard’s Conan stories seem to me not so much a mark of bad writing (although he was writing at speed, and frequently did write pretty badly), as a reflection of the earnestness you speak of. Cleverness and irony would get in the way of the warrior virtues Conan embodies.
As for his racism, I do think it’s qualitatively different from Lovecraft’s. Lovecraft is one of the few white supremacists I’ve come across that I think actually suffered from racism as a disease, as opposed to an ideology a white person adopts, consciously or not, because it offers that white person psychological, social, or emotional advantages. I think that when Lovecraft walked down the street and saw a person of African descent he probably was seized with a psychologically debilitating horror. It might be a condition that results from privilege, but it strikes me as a genuine affliction for Lovecraft, a phobia that probably prevented him from navigating multiethnic spaces the same way agoraphobia would prevent one from strolling through a field.
Howard’s racism seems of a type that can no longer exist in our culture. (Not that racism no longer exists! But in different forms from Howard’s.) As an autodidact, I bet he had gone to the Cross Plains, Texas library and read lots of books on, say, anthropology. But those books (many of which would have been published, say, twenty years earlier, around 1900) would have been works of Social Darwinism, scientifically “proving” the superiority of white people. When Howard mouths those old saws, he’s just “trusting the science,” as we say nowadays.
I imagine he might never have met a black person who’d had the opportunity to receive an education; having only met uneducated black people, it would be natural for him to think of black people as uneducated. Although he might have read the speeches of Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, that wouldn’t have the impact of seeing filmed speeches by Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or a performance by Poitier, or any of the thousands of examples that surround us of undeniably witty, articulate, intelligent black people that our mass culture offers us, even if you grow up in some ultra-white pocket of the country.
If Robert Howard were brought forward to 2025 and spent a few months in our world, I like to think he would revise his racist opinions without feeling particularly traumatized in his identity as a white man. He did have racist opinions, but he didn’t have skin in that game, so to speak, in the same sense Lovecraft or David Duke, for example.
As for his depictions of women, it’s true; they’re awkward. I find myself preferring Howard stories where there are no women, like “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” because their ability to slice the heads off of pirates without ever mussing their lipstick gets hard to take. That’s not just a Howard thing. His contemporary Catherine Moore also published sword-and-sorcery in Weird Tales; her recurring heroine was Jirel of Joiry. (My eight-year-old has been made to periodically sit through the audiobook reading of the Jirel story “The Black God’s Kiss” since he was about five.) Jirel is awesome in the same way as Conan, but it’s clear from the descriptions that she also is unbelievably hot. Surreal moments arise when she will be, say, chomping on a leg of mutton and wiping the grease off her mouth with the back of her hand, and yet it’s clear from the descriptions of her full red sensual crimson lips that she must be wearing lipstick. She’s an armor-clad swordswoman who’s a match for any man-at-arms, but without any unsightly upper-body muscularity that would interrupt the line of her delicately slender form. Folks in that scene just couldn’t figure out how to write women, even when they were women.
Finally, speaking of sleazy covers, I’ve heard the cover artist Margaret Brundage occasionally referred to as “Margaret Bondage.”
I agree about Lovecraft. "Racist" doesn't begin to cover it. He didn't seem to like even other white people unless they came from the same part of England as his ancestors. But that very Xenophobia made his Fear of The Alien Other descriptions compelling.
Howard was more just a product of his time. Many early progressives shared such racial attitudes.
This was wonderful! I haven't read a ton of Conan, but what I have read I've enjoyed, very much for the reasons you cite. I first read him as an adult -- Conan the Conqueror (a retitling of "The Hour of the Dragon") in an Ace Double (backed with one of Leigh Brackett's very best stories, "The Sword of Rhiannon".)
(Those covers are definitely by Margaret Brundage, by the way. And while Weird Tales certainly had financial issues with there "low" circulation of maybe 50,000 -- the SF/Fantasy/Horror magazines of today would kill for a circulation that high!)
I am very much looking forward to your story later this week.
(I reviewed the Ace Double here: http://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2015/11/ace-doubles-conan-conqueror-by-robert-e.html)
Many current magazines of many stripes would like a 50K circulation.
Speaking of Johnny Weissmuller, I highly recommend this poem about him by the late Clive James, which I think gets to the heart of the appeal of the white barbarian figure, who is both alien and relatable:
https://archive.clivejames.com/poetry/acapulco.htm
Wow. Thanks for posting that. Not something I would have found on my own.
There was a guy at my high school who could do an amazing rendition of the Tarzan call. He went on to become a KY state trooper.
This year is the 150th anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs's birth. The fanboys celebrate. https://pulpfest.com/
Really great read! My wife's uncle collected Conan comics, so our family is nostalgic for that kind of pulp. I'm excited to dive into your recommendations.
Get excited about Lovecraft. My essential reads for him to get started:
1. Dagon
2. The Call of Cthulhu
3. The Colour Out of Space*
4. Pickman's Model
5. The Dunwich Horror*
6. The Music of Eric Zahn
7. At the Mountains of Madness*
8. The Shadow Out of Time
*Emphasis on these three.
"However, the pulps have one advantage over these other categories, especially over the slicks, in that they gave rise to an intense fan culture."
This started with Hugo Gernsback, who regularly formed fan clubs for all his magazines and published reader letters, with addresses, which allowed them to contact one another and meet up in real life, leading eventually to conventions.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5788180/
Ray Palmer was another early superfan who went on to become a publisher and solidified the UFO conspiracy subculture in print.
https://www.frednadis.com/_b_the_man_from_mars__ray_palmer_s_amazing_pulp_journey__b__118142.htm
I never knew there was so much to Conan! But then my image of him is solely based on the film and Arnie—I've never seen any of the original print versions.
And I'm now wondering how far these pulps penetrated the UK market—as a kid growing up in the 60s I was aware of imported comics like Superman, and when my pocket money would stretch occasionally bought one (to my Mum's disapproval).
Also wondering whether the slick/highbrow/pulp categories were replicated here.
Check out the 70s era comics, particularly the long-form ones that were more substantive than the comic books.
Savage Sword of Conan was solid gold. The black-and-white art really worked for Conan. Didn't look like a superhero comic at all.
I won't admit how many volumes of the collected Savage Sword of Conan I've read, but it's well over a dozen. Incredibly consistent quality for year after year, too.
Watched Conan the Destroyer (1984) recently on one of the streamers. Don’t think I had ever seen it. It’s the second of the Conan movies. Not terrible, but not good either. Not sure that Wilt Chamberlain added much, although Grace Jones was fun to watch, and Olivia d’Abo was pretty good in her role. Some truly phony-looking special effects. About as good as can be expected for a sequel, I suppose, but, really, given full access to Howard’s works, I’m pretty sure just about anyone could have come up with a better storyline.
Maybe these stories work better in the world of the imagination than on the screen. About the only thing that translates well is the physicality of Conan. If you look at the famous Frank Frazetta covers for the early Conan reprints, that’s basically Arnie you’re looking at, it seems to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbjjhKaoZKs
This Frank Frazetta documentary talks about how much trouble De Laurentis went to in the first film to translate Frazetta's paintings to the screen, shot for shot.
https://tubitv.com/movies/100020606/frazetta-painting-with-fire
According to every con panel I've ever been to, those covers were what sold the Conan books off the spinner racks in the 50s and 60s. Lots of knock-off authors as well.
I just bought The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian. All in
Came to read about Conan and stayed for the unexpectedly awesome literary history lesson!
Though pulps never lacked female readers, and writers, as well. And even beyond those "aimed" squarely at them, such as romance-fiction pulps.
The first thing that leapt into my mind as I read this was that it sounds a lot like a modern (?) Cuhuliann, of Irish folk story fame. Not absolutely sure that that fits but it sure feels like it. Same super-macho hero type, same low-brow audience (even centuries apart). Wonder if there's a link. Anyone know more about that possibility??