Cross Plains in
the 1920s was a small town of approximately 2000 people, give
or take a thousand. Like much of the Central West Texas region,
though, it went through periodic oil booms that brought hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of temporary inhabitants who set up camps just
outside the town limits, jammed the hotels beyond capacity, and
rented rooms or beds in private homes. The lease men, riggers,
drillers, tool dressers, and roughnecks who followed the oil were
followed in their turn by others who sought to make a quick buck
off them, from men or women who set up temporary hamburger stands
to feed them, to gamblers and whores who provided “recreation,”
to thugs, thieves and con men who simply preyed on them. An oil
boom could transform a sleepy little community into a big city
in no time at all, in those days, and bring with it much social
upheaval. The few extra thousand who swelled the population of
Cross Plains managed to make it a far wilder and rowdier town
than usual. One resident recalls her family driving into town
on Saturday night just to watch people, hoping fights would break
out. Of the atmosphere in a boom-town, Howard wrote: “I’ll
say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that life’s
a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.”
Just as fast as the town grew, however, it could decline: when
the oil played out, the speculators, oil-field workers and their
camp-followers moved on. The influence of this boom-and-bust cycle
on Howard’s later ideas about the growth and decline of
civilization -- that societies are built by hardy pioneers, who
are then followed by others who grow decadent and enjoy the fruits
of the society but contribute nothing to its continued growth,
and thus inevitably the society will decay or be overthrown by
a new generation of pioneers -- has often been overlooked.
Robert Howard attended the local high school, where he was remembered
as polite and reserved. To make pocket money he labored at a variety
of jobs, including hauling trash, picking up and delivering laundry
for dry-cleaners, working as a store clerk and loading freight
at the train station. He had some close friends among the local
boys, but none shared his literary interests, which had probably
been nurtured from an early age by his mother, an ardent lover
of poetry. He was an avid reader, claiming even to have raided
schoolhouses during the summer in his quest for books. While this
story is no doubt exaggerated, it demonstrates his love of reading,
a rarity in these outlying communities, most of which had no libraries,
much less bookstores. Howard devoured books at an extraordinary
rate, astonishing his friends with his ability to pick up a book
and turn the pages faster than they thought anyone could actually
read. Yet later he could remember what he had read with perfect
clarity. His friend Lindsey Tyson claimed that Howard had memorized
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ after only two readings.
Howard’s library, presented by his father to Howard Payne
College after his death, reveals the breadth of his interests:
history and fiction are dominant, but also represented are biography,
sports, poetry, anthropology, Texana and erotica. Near the end
of his life, Howard wrote to the renowned fantasist H.P. Lovecraft,
with whom he corresponded regularly, about his favorite writers.
These included Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Mark Twain, Sax
Rohmer, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling,
Sir Walter Scott, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft.
A huge fan of poetry, Howard also sought out the verse of Robert
W. Service, Kipling, Sidney Lanier, Poe, Walter de la Mare, Omar
Khayyam, Henry Herbert Knibbs, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Tennyson,
Alfred Noyes and Lovecraft, among many others.