Friday, October 11, 2013

Robert E. Howard



 The Works of Robert E. Howard web page.  The idea behind this page is to make available for the Howard scholar and collector, a list of every story, article, fragment and synopsis written by REH, and where to find them. It is not intended to make judgements about Howard and what he wrote, but merely to list everything. Some additional material is included, such as verse books, books about Howard, etc.  Please feel free to comment on anything you find here.  To reiterate one more time, this site is a work in progress and is not yet complete.

In many ways, Howard is one of the grandfathers of pulp fiction. Certainly he is one of the most highly regarded of the men who stalked the shadowy, hallowed halls of magazines like Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, Action Stories, Fight Stories, Ghost Stories, Cowboy Stories, and more.

So few of the pulp authors have gone on to have schools of scholarship built around them--Howard stands near the top of this heap, alongside his friend H.P. Lovecraft. Possibly the reason for this is Howard's sheer versatility. There seems to be no genre the man could not tackle, be it as the founder of the Heroic Fantasy subgenre, a contributor to western stories, detective tales, even planetary romance. And his writing was good, too. In fact, many consider him to be one of the greats, so far as his sheer writing ability goes. That's no small feat in a genre of writing whose hallmark is often purple prose.

If you need ideas for your pulp game, you could do far worse than consulting Howard's stories.

A link to free online versions of his work: http://www.feedbooks.com/author/245


1 comment:

Bill Cavalier said...

Both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson told me that Howard's Conan stories were one of the primary influences as they were creating Dungeons & Dragons. Scarlet Citadel and Red Nails, among others, are both fantastic dungeons crawls!

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