Ultimate Collection

Now get this: Back in 1892 James J. Corbett, a skillful boxer, whipped John L. Sullivan, a superslugger, and then knocked out Charles Mitchell, the only man who'd ever given John L. much of an argument.

Now: Some years later, in 1926, James J. Tunney, like Corbett, an Irishman, whipped Jack Dempsey, a superslugger, after having knocked out Tom Gibbons, the only man who'd been able to stay with Jack—the only difference being that Tunney knocked out Gibbons before he won the title and not after.

Now, that lines Corbett and Tunney up together enough, I guess. Both Irish, both boxers, both named James J., both winning their titles from dark-browed, furious sluggers of Irish blood.

All right: Corbett in 1897 met an ex-blacksmith from New Zealand—Irish and a rugged fighter, named Tom Heeney. Result—? A new champion, I say. Heeney isn't Tunney's equal in speed, punch or cleverness, but then Corbett had it all over Fitzsimmons in the way of speed and skill.

So, just as I predicted Dempsey's defeat by Tunney when I heard Gene's real name was James J., so I now predict defeat for Tunney because of the New Zealnad jinx, a factor to be reckoned with. I hope Tunney wins; I like Heeney, but I like Tunney better. Still, I predict his defeat.

Robert E. Howard to The Ring, Apr 1926

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Here is my opinion on the greatest heavyweights of all time: Boxing reached its height between 1892 and 1905. That was the ring’s Golden Era. The culmination of perfection, the pinnacle of achievement, the greatest heavyweight of all time was James J. Jefferies. Records prove that. During his reign there flourished the greatest collection of heavyweights ever seen, and he was the greatest of all. He defeated all manner of boxers.

In Corbett he beat the fastest heavyweight and the cleverest boxer that ever lived; in Fitzsimmons the most effective hitter of any time; in Tom Sharkey, the greatest of all near champions. While Jefferies would not rank first in skill, speed or hitting ability, for all around prowess he was invincible.

Peter Jackson never saw the day that he could have beaten Jefferies; and the idea of Johnson beating Jefferies when the white man was at his best is ridiculous. Johnson lacked both the ability and the nerve. As for Sullivan and Dempsey, they would have fought themselves out punching Jefferies, and then have been defeated. If there ever was a man who might have won from Jefferies it was Corbett, when at his prime.

This is my rating of heavyweights: James J. Jefferies; James J. Corbett; Jack Dempsey; Peter Jackson; Bob Fitzsimmons; John L. Sullivan; Tom Sharkey; Kid McCoy; Sam Langford; Jack Johnson; Louis Firpo and Jess Willard.

Robert E. Howard

Cross Plains, Texas

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, ca. Jan 1926

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Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas, writes concerning Mr. Quinn's stories of Jules de Grandin: "These are sheer masterpieces. The little Frenchman is one of those characters who live in fiction. I look forward with pleasurable anticipation to further meetings with him."

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jun 1927

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Your last three issues have been very fine. Certainly no magazine has ever offered a tale as unique and thought-inspiring as the serial by MR. Cummings.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, May 1928

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Mr. Lovecraft's latest story, The Call of Cthulhu, is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary worlld he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken. His scope is unlimited and his range is cosmic. He has the rare gift of making the unreal seem very real and terrible, without lessening the sensation of horror attendant thereto. He touches peaks in his tales which no modern or ancient writer has ever hinted. Sentences and phrases leap suddenly at the reader, as if in utter blackness of solar darkness a door were suddenly flung open, whence flamed the red fire of Purgatory and through which might be momentarily glimpsed monstrous and nightmarish shapes. Herbert Spencer may have right when he said that it was beyond the human mind to grasp the Unknowable, but Mr. Lovecraft is in a fair way of disproving that theory, I think. I await his next story with eager anticipation, knowing that whatever the subject may be, it will be handled with the skill and incredible vision which he has always shown.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Nov 1929

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I have just been reading the September WEIRD TALES, which blossomed out on the news stands today. I was especially taken with A Jest and a Vengeance, by E. Hoffmann Price. I've never been east of New Orleans, but as far as I am concerned Price has captured the true spirit of the East in his tales, just as Kipling did. His stories breathe the Orient. In this latest tale I note, as in all his others, that patterned background of beauty for which he is noted. The action is perfectly attuned to the thought of the tale and that thought goes deep. More, through the weaving runs a minor note of diabolical humor, tantalizing and enthralling.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Apr 1930

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Thirsty Blades is fine. It moves like a cavalry charge, with an incessant clashing of steel that stirs the blood. Gigantic shadows from the outer gulfs fall across the actors of the drama, yet the sense of realism is skillfully retained.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jan 1931

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I was particularly fascinated by the poem by Alice l'Anson in the latest issue. The writer must surely live in Mexico, for I believe that only one familiar with that ancient land could so reflect the slumbering soul of prehistoric Aztec-land as she has done. There is a difference in a poem written on some subject by one afar off and poem written on the same subject by one familiar with the very heart of that subject. I have put it very clumsily, but Teotihuacan breathes the cultural essence, spirit and soul of Mexico.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Mar 1932

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Congratulations on the appearance and excellence of the current Weird Tales. The make-up and all the illustrations are unusually good, and the contents are of remarkably uniform merit. That is what struck me—the high standard of all the stories in the issue. If I were to express a preference for any one of the tales, I believe I should name Derleth's Those Who Seek—though the stories by Smith, Long, Hurst and Jacobi could scarcely be excelled. In the latter's tale especially there are glimpses that show finely handled imagination almost in perfection—just enough revealed, just enough concealed. Smith's sweep of imagination and fantasy is enthralling, but what captivates me most is the subtle, satiric humor that threads its delicate way through so much of his work—a sly humorthat equals the more sublte touches of Rabelais and Petronius. Yes, I consider the current magazine uniformly fine, of an excellance suprizing considering the fact that neither Lovecraft, Quinn, Hamilton, Whitehead, Kline nor Price was represented.

Robert E. Howard to Weird Tales, Jun 1936

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Enthusiasm impels me to pause from burning spines off cactus for my drouth-bedeviled goats long enough to give three slightly dust-choked cheers for the April cover illustration. The color combination is vivid and attractive, the lady is luscious, and altogether I think it's the best thing Mrs. Brundage has done since she illustrated my Black Colossus. And that's no depreciation of the covers done between these master-pictures. I must also express my appreciation to Mr. Napoli, who has done a splendid job of illustrating my serial. I hope the readers have liked the yarn as well as I liked writing it.

Personal Letters:

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To Robert Barlow

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Dear Mr. Barlow:

Thank you very much for the copy of the Goblin Tower; a neat, attractive job of printing and binding which does credit to Long's splendid verse.

Robert E. Howard

To August Derleth

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Reverse:

This card was purchased in Lincoln, N.M. from a descendant of a participant in the Bloody Lincoln County War.

REH

To Harold Preece

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Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, Oct 20, 1928

Salaam:

Your stationery is alright. How is the university? Frankly, I know very little about the school and the little I do know is bad, but I'm prejudiced against all colleges—to Hell with them.

The American Legion—gah! They're supposed to be running the fight club here and won't put on a decent show; been expecting me to rustle some good hard slugging boys who'll fight for little or nothing. I worked up a good grudge bout between two boxers who hated each other, but it fell through and I'm done with the damned business. I was going to San Antonio to the convention, mainly because Sammy Baker was supposed to fight there, but I didn't make it. I wish to Hell I had; I'd have liked to have been there.

About O. Henry and the ostrich feather business—I can't work up much resentment against a girl who's that childish—too much like the action of a little kid who isn't responsible for her thoughts.

"The King of Kings" gripped me. I though it was powerful, though I think Joseph Schildrkraut ran away with the picture as Judas. And William Boyd, that fellow is the most human actor in the world. H.B. Warner lacked fire of course, but I don't know who else could have done even as good as he did…

I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.

About Atlantis—I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there—in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high stage of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.

The occultists say that we are the fifth—I believe—great sub-race. Two unknown and annamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.

All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor whom I sold a tale entitled "The Shadow Kingdom", which I expect will be published a a foreword to that story—if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis.

I wish I had money—I'd take several courses in anthropology and the various phases of antiquity, and spend the rest of my life exploring ruins in out-of-the-way corners of the globe. The guture of the race interests me little; the present but a little more; the past, greatly. An occultist of my acquaintance, who has gone deeper in the matter than any man I ever knew, says I have a very ancient soul, am a reincarnated Atlantean, in fact! Maybe if there's anything to this soul business, or to reincarnation, that theory is maybe right. Sure I live in the dust of the past and my dreams are seldom of present or future, but I am ever treading roads of the dim ages and strange are some of the figures whom I meet and strange the shapes who stare at me.

I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.

Oh, the gauds and the baubles and the frills and the tinsel! All empty show and the smoke of conceit and arrogance, but what a drab thing life would be without them. Hell, man can long for a world of working men all they wish—for a world of common sense and reason—I like the gilt and the silver bells, even if they can never be mine. The cap and wand of the jester, and the blare of the golden trumpets!

Hell, it's all a game, and let us be children and clap our hands when the gallant cavalcade wings by, and not look for the rust on the spears and the stains on the banners—not all the time, at least. I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.

Oh Hell, may I always be able to laugh at myself. Self mockery is a good wine to drink sometimes. Satan blast my soul. You'll have to pardon all this rambling. I had nothing to say when I started. Answer soon.

Robert E. Howard to Harold Preece, c. Oct 1930

Well, Harold, how did you like my story, The Voice of El-Lil, in the new Oriental Stories? I'm very pleased with the magazine myself. But listen—if you've read the story, you probably noticed a sentence which referred to non-Aryan peoples in Connaught AND Galway. That's the printer's mistake, not mine; I wrote "Connaught and Galloway," meaning, of course, the province of Scotland. I don't know why it was changed.

I find tales of the East extremely fascinating, and am beginning to believe that the old, old theory of Turkish-Gaelic affinity is well bourne out. The races have so much in common cruelty, treachery, loyalty, fatalism, spend-thriftness, beserk fighting rage, a love of music and poetry.

I lately sold a tale to Oriental Stories in which I created the most somber character I have yet attempted. The story is called Hawks of Outremer, and I got $120 for it. The character is Cormac FitzGeoffrey: "Clean shaven and the various scars that showed on his dark, grim face lent his already formidable features a truly sinister aspect. His low, broad forehead was topped by black, square cut hair that contrasted strongly with his cold blue eyes. Son of a woman of the O'Briens and a renegade Norman night, Geoffry the Bastard, in whose veins, it is said, coursed the blood of William the Conqueror, Cormac had seldom known an hour's peace or ease in all his thirty years of violent life. Hated by the Irish and despised by the Normans he payed back contempt and ill treatment with savage hate and ruthless vengeance."

One of the main things I like about Farnsworth Wright's magazines is you don't have to make your heros such utter saints. I took Cormac FitzGeoffrey into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies and am considering writing a series of tales about him.

The tang of fall is in the air and the whisper of autumn in the skies. Summer is waning into the yellow leaves of all the yesterdays, and the heart of me is thin and old. The sky is deep and blue and mysterious with the changing of the seasons, and strange thoughts stir deep in me, but age forever steals on me in the autumn of the year, and though I am young, my soul is old and wavering like a thread-bare garment outworn.

All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.

It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore.

I never saw such things; yet they gleam plainly in my dreams. I see them with the eyes of old Samuel Walser, who knew them and loved them in his youth, aye, and with the eyes of a thousand generations of blue-eyed, red-haired fishermen and sailors and Vikings behind him, who were his ancestors, and who were no less ancestors of mine.

Ah, well, I will not weary you with my vagaries.

Bob

To E. Hoffman Price

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Dear Ed:

Sorry to hear Pawang Ali has been banished. I can't imagine why. It was a fine series. However I'm sure you'll find another character to take his place. I haven't time to write much. My mother is very low and I fear cannot survive. I have little heart to speak of writing or anything else, but I will say that I have made several sales recently; the first two of the Pike Bearfield series to Argosy, another Spicy adventure, a Breck Elkins yarn to Action (now a monthly and has expressed a desire for a monthly Elkins) and another of the same type to Popular's Star Western. All these sales were made within the past ten days. Best Wishes,

Bob

To Donald Wandrei

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Dear Mr. Wandrei:

I've been meaning to write to you for some time, but somehow didn't get around to it.

I appreciate your kind comments regarding my Weird Tales stories; though I'm afraid "The Tower of the Elephant" won't stack up very highly against Smith's magnificent "Isle of Tortures."

I have long admired your work in that magazine, as I have indicated in the letters both to the editors and to Lovecraft. Your poetry is absolutely splendid, and your "Lives of Alfred Kramer" is as fine a work of its kind as I have ever read.

I am glad to hear you are enjoying your visit to New York so well. In reply to your question regarding possible East-faring on my part, I'm afraid the matter is very indefinite. If I go anywhere, I'm more likely to take the other direction.

Hoping to hear from you at your convenience, I am,

Cordially,

[REH]

A Tribute Poem

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R. E. H. by R. H. Barlow

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Conan, the warrior king, lies stricken dead

Beneath a sky of cryptic stars; the lute

That was his laughter stilled, and sadly mute

Upon the chilling earth his youthful head.

There sounds for him no more the clamorous fray,

But dirges now, where once the trumpet loud:

About him press old memories for shroud,

And ended is the conflict of the day.

Death spilled the blood of him who loved the fight

As men love mistresses, and fought it well—

His fair young flesh is marble where he fell

With broken sword that vanquished all but Night;

And as of mythic kings our words must speak

Of Conan now, who roves where dreamers seek.