Robert E. Howard in Depth

Where can I learn more about Howard?

An excellent place to start would be Rusty Burke’s “A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard,” available online at the Robert E. Howard United Press Association’s site. CPI (Conan Properties International) has an Official Robert E. Howard site and forums, with plenty of information and discussion on the man and his works. The Wikipedia entry for Howard is a good deal better than it was in previous iterations, but the nature of a publically-editable database means that anyone can go in there and alter it, so it should be correlated with other sources wherever possible. Other excellent online resources can be found at The Robert E. Howard Directory, which include blogs from established Howard scholars: Don Herron’s site, Damon Sasser’s Robert E. Howard: Two Gun Raconteur blog, Dennis McHaney’s McHaney’s Robert E. Howard, Dave Hardy’s Fire and Sword, Ed Waterman’s Barbarian Keep, Brian Murphy’s The Silver Key, the now defunct The Cimmerian blog, and more: just peruse the links to the left.

Beyond the internet, there is a wealth of great scholarly material about Howard, much of which can be found in the “about REH” section of Bill Thom’s essential bibliographic site Howard Works. In particular, Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard is an excellent biography, with a second, revised edition coming soon. Other excellent books on Howard’s life include Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard, Novalyne Price’s One Who Walked Alone, Tevis Clyde Smith’s Report on a Writing Man & Other Reminiscences of Robert E. Howard, and Dennis McHaney’s Robert E. Howard: World’s Greatest Pulpster.