Even before Howard
bought his own car in 1932, he and his parents travelled widely
around Texas, to visit friends and relatives, and for his mother’s
health, which was in serious decline. After he bought his Chevrolet
sedan, his friends Lindsey Tyson and Truett Vinson joined him
on excursions further afield, from Fort Worth to the Rio Grande
Valley, and from the East Texas oil fields to New Mexico. His
letters to Lovecraft describe much of the geography and history
of these places, and are interesting travelogues, quite apart
from being windows into Howard’s life.
His correspondence with Lovecraft seems to have inspired the young
writer to attempt stories similar to those of the acknowledged
master. One such early effort, ‘The Children of the Night,’
also brings together some key Howardian elements such as racial
memory and race hatred, a Celtic warrior and a primitive subterranean
race. Other Lovecraft-styled stories followed, such as ‘The
Thing on the Roof’ and ‘The Black Stone,’ introducing
Howard’s own contributions to the ‘Cthulhu Mythos,’
in the form of Von Junzt and his hellish ‘Black Book,’
Nameless Cults (later dubbed Unaussprechlichen Kulten), and the
mad poet Justin Geoffrey. The Lovecraft influence was the final
ingredient needed in the rich imaginative mix that produced Howard’s
most popular and enduring work - his tales of Conan the Cimmerian.
In a letter to Lovecraft in April 1932, Howard outlined his latest
creation: “I’ve been working on a new character, providing
him with a new epoch - the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten,
but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths. [Farnsworth]
Wright rejected most of the series, but I did sell him one - ‘The
Phoenix on the Sword’ which deals with the adventures of
King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilonia.”
In a postscript to the same letter, he wrote: “Wright took
another of the Conan the Cimmerian series, ‘The Tower of
the Elephant,’ the setting of which is among the spider-haunted
jeweled towers of Zamora the Accursed, while Conan was still a
thief by profession, before he came into the kingship.”
Much later, Howard would tell a fan that “Conan simply grew
up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little
border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any
conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion
and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.”
To fellow author Clark Ashton Smith he said, “While I don’t
go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually
existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly
denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible
that unrecognized forces of the past or present - or even the
future - work through the thoughts and actions of living men.
This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the
Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been unable
to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly
to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately
a stream of stories flowed off my pen - or rather, off my typewriter
- almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating,
but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded
on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For
weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The
character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out
everything else in the way of story-writing.”