Conan?
Grace A. Warren, opening lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138
The tall barbarian?
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind?
Aye—I remember Conan!
Although Robert E. Howard died in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, the study of the life, letters, and work of Howard have often lagged behind Lovecraft. This was not for want of fans; Donald Wollheim consulted Lovecraft on the possibility of issuing a collection of Howard’s fiction shortly after the Texas pulpster’s death. However, circumstances were different: it took time to settle Howard’s estate, which went to his father Dr. I. M. Howard. Doctor Howard was not familiar with publishing, and with his son’s agent Otis Adelbert Kline worked to receive compensation due for stories his son had sold and to place what unpublished works remained—but various projects to get Robert E. Howard into print failed to be financially feasible, and unlike Lovecraft there was no one who thought to deposit Howard’s collected correspondence at a local university, no energetic duo like August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House specifically to put Lovecraft in print.
By the time Arkham House did publish the first hardback American collection of Howard’s fiction, Skull-Face and Others (1946), Dr. Howard was dead…but Robert E. Howard’s posthumous career was just beginning. Arkham House had shown the viability of small presses dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, and pulp authors from storied publications like Weird Tales were in demand among the burgeoning fan movement. Gnome Press began publishing the Conan series in 1950, and after five books had exhausted most of Howard’s finished Conan material—at which point L. Sprague de Camp produced Tales of Conan (1955), a series of Howard non-Conan stories re-written as Conan adventures, and then the original novel The Return of Conan (1957), a novel by Björn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp.
Although Conan and Robert E. Howard hadn’t hit a mass audience—that would have to wait for the release of the Lancer paperbacks in the 1960s with the iconic Frank Frazetta covers, the Conan the Barbarian comic book by Marvel beginning in 1970, and finally the 1982 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous barbarian—organized fandom activity around Howard began to pick up. Robert E. Howard had never quite been forgotten: there are many references to him and his work in the 1940s fanzine The Acolyte, which was nominally devoted to Lovecraft, for example. Yet in 1955 the Hyborian Legion was formed, and among the fanzines put out was one called Amra, named after Conan’s pseudonym among the pirates of the Black Coast.
Like most fanzines, issues of Amra weren’t intended as scholarly journals the way modern works like The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies is, but it was a step in that direction, a place where fans who wanted to talk about Howard and the characters and settings he created could share their insights and thoughts, fanfiction and poetry, art and cartoons, essays and articles. During its fairly long run, Amra attracted some interesting names (including Frederic Wertham of Seduction of the Innocent fame, who would go on to write The World of Fanzines in 1973). It took decades more work for Howard studies to be properly established, with a pure-text movement and the publication of Howard’s letters, much as had been done with Lovecraft, but Amra played its part.
But what could Conan be to me?
Grace A. Warren, lines from “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138
Father of fatherless children?
For who should train such sons to manliness?
Not I alone.
Who should shelter daughters fair?
Not I alone!
Grace Adams Warren (born Marguerite Grace Adams) and her husband Dana Thurston Warren appear to have been involved with organized fandom from at least the 1960s through the 1990s, though exact dates are hard to come by. Her poem “I Remember Conan” appeared in the ninth issue of Amra vol. II (January 1960), and is reminiscent of such works as “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman and “The Acolytes” (1946) by Lilith Lorraine—fan poetry, a pure expression of sentiment. She would have written that in the years between the last of the Gnome Press books, but before the Lancer paperbacks, when it really was fanzines like Amra that were keeping the memory of Robert E. Howard and his favorite barbarian alive.
It is easy now to forget how precarious memory can be—how easily the public forgets, how few characters find an audience, how many pulp authors lie forgotten, their works no longer read or published, no one much caring whether they’ve fallen into the public domain or if they were ever written at all. It is easy to overlook, in this time of corporate-driven properties and big-budget films and streaming adaptations, that such works are often only possible because of continued fan-interest, fans who take the original material and comment, study, and build on it over time. Nowadays, there are wikis and websites, discussion groups and discords to facilitate the kind of communication that was carried out at the speed of a manual typewriter and a mail carrier’s measured pace.
For Howard studies in particular, fan contributions tend to be overlooked. The pure text movement that began in the 1970s emphasized the changes that had been made to the published stories and the wider setting and Mythos of the Howard tales, by editors and pasticheurs like L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and others. And there was quite a lot of non-Howard material dealing with Conan that would be published over the years, from original novels, comic books, film adaptations, video games, tabletop roleplaying games and more. If you’re going to draw the line between Howard’s original work and a “official” (in the sense of being authorized by the estate or its agents) pastiche novel like The Return of Conan, critical interest in even more derived works like The Leopard of Poitain (1985) by Raul Garcia-Capella, The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi, The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez, and Sangre Bárbara (2021) by El Torres, Joe Bocardo, & Manoli Martínez is perhaps understandably low.
Yet these derivative works are worthy of study and appreciation in their own right. They have something to say about Howard’s characters, and they represent—as Grace Warren’s “I Remember Conan” represents—how inspiring Robert E. Howard’s writing can be, that it drives fans to create and remember, long after Howard’s own untimely death.
You too will remember Conan,
Grace A. Warren, last lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138
The tall barbarian,
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind—
Aye—even as I remember Conan!
“I Remember Conan” was first published in Amra. Vol. II, no. 9 (1960), and was reprinted in The Conan Grimoire (1972).
Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).
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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 
“It is easy now to forget how precarious memory can be—how easily the public forgets, how few characters find an audience, how many pulp authors lie forgotten, their works no longer read or published, no one much caring whether they’ve fallen into the public domain or if they were ever written at all. It is easy to overlook, in this time of corporate-driven properties and big-budget films and streaming adaptations, that such works are often only possible because of continued fan-interest, fans who take the original material and comment, study, and build on it over time….”
Movingly eloquent, and so, so true! With fans frequently mocked as nerds bickering over minutiae such as what color Robin’s tights were in his first appearance, this reminds that they could be Keepers of the Flame too.
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