![]() ![]() He was a fan of Kipling, Sax Rohmer, Jack London, Rider Haggard (who is amazing and largely forgotten) and Edgar Rice Burroughs and the myriad of Authors in Adventure magazine. Howard was also interested, as were many in his day, in Theosophy and their weird ideas about Atlantis and Lemuria. For a small example, Conan was a Cimmerian Cimmerians were the Scythians of ancient history, written about by Herodotus. Howard of course had a basic background in classic literature, as most high school graduates did in his day: Shakespeare, The Bible, Beowulf, The Norse Sagas, Arabian Knights, the Greeks and Romans. You have to figure there was a lot of Conan taken directly from the stuff he read, and Conan fans might get a kick out of his literary interests. The man killed himself at age 30, so he wasn’t drawing on a particularly deep reading life. ![]() The main problem with his books are there aren’t enough of them. Howard books Conan and Bran Mak Morn are a sort of peak pulp storytelling of a certain kind, just as his friend HPL’s stories are peak pulp horror. ![]() Conan Doyle to Balzac, Bob Service’s verse to Santayana’s writing, a prize fight to a lecture on art.” I prefer jazz to classical music, musical burlesques to Greek tragedy, A. “My tastes and habits are simple I am neither erudite nor sophisticated. ![]()
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