Deeper Cut: How to Read One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis

How to Read One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis
by
Bobby Derie

While they were acquainted for only about 22 months between the autumn of 1934 and the summer of 1936 (with a brief meeting in 1933), Ellis’ remembrance of Howard is the longest and most intimate memoir from anyone who personally knew him to be published. By the time that Howard scholarship focused on trying to record the memories of Howard’s friends and relatives, many had died, others were attempting to recall events from forty or fifty years before, and relatively few had intimate knowledge of Bob’s life and work.

All of which makes Novalyne Price Ellis’ One Who Walked Alone, published in 1986, an important resource for Howard studies. The book-length memoir of her on-again, off-again relationship with Bob Howard from 1934-1936 also gives a picture of life as a schoolteacher in a small Texas town, and the community of Cross Plains during the Great Depression, providing additional context to the narrative of her life and relationship with Bob.

The question scholars have to ask themselves before they use One Who Walked Alone is: how to read it? Can we read it strictly as nonfiction, or should it be considered closer to a work of fiction strongly drawn from real life, like Robert E. Howard’s semiautobiographical novel Post Oaks & Sand Roughs? What are Novalyne Price Ellis’ intentions and biases in writing this book, and how do these affect the final work? Perhaps most importantly, what does Ellis not address in One Who Walked Alone, and what can we read from those gaps?

These aren’t easy questions to answer because with Mrs. Ellis is deceased, and her original source materials have never been made available. However, we do have access to contemporary newspaper articles, memoirs about Robert E. Howard, and Howard’s own collected letters, which we can compare against the text and use to verify specific dates and events. We also have access to some of Novalyne Price Ellis’ own statements and letters, both during the period when she was writing and editing her manuscript for publication, and afterwards when she answered questions from fans and scholars. 

By combining these materials, a close reading of One Who Walked Alone reveals more about the nature of Novalyne’s book and how we should read it. When it comes to evaluating memoirs as historical documents, we must trust the authors to be honest—but verify as much as we can.

To begin with the text itself, in her foreword Novalyne Price Ellis reveals that the text began with “old diaries and journals I had kept from 1934 to 1936 (OWWA 11); in her preface, she reveals that “two names in the book […] were changed in order not to embarrass anyone still living” (OWWA 12). This by itself makes evident two important facts: that this memoir is drawn from her journals (and in fact takes the form of entries from those primary source documents), and that they have been edited or altered.

In fact, a look at Novalyne Price Ellis’ letters from 1978-1986 gives an idea of her process in writing and editing One Who Walked Alone. Early letters suggest she began simply transcribing her handwritten diaries and journals, typing them out to make them legible, e.g.:

Several years before I met Bob I was interested in writing, and I kept diaries and journals. Because of my interest in drama, I wrote conversations I had with people including those (many of them) that Bob and I had. The last few months Sprague de Camp has been urging me to write about Bob. If I could publish the diaries exactly as I wrote them, I would do so. Then people would know that Bob was neither crazy nor a freak. I am trying to type up the diaries and journals this summer before I begin another year of teaching.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 3 Jul 1978, Selected Letters 2.3

However, it quickly becomes clear that Ellis wasn’t just transcribing the diaries and journals, but was also rewriting portions of the text:

Last week, I finished a section of my book that I have rewritten twice, and I still don’t like it. Some of the things I wrote in 1934 were pretty bad. I couldn’t decide what to do with it—whether or not to throw it away entirely, but I couldn’t do that, because it was something that had to be in the book.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague de Camp, 5 Aug 1979, Selected Letters 1.30

What exactly this rewriting consisted of is unclear—presumably changes of phrasing, silently correcting spelling errors, making entries stylistically consistent, etc. Some of the changes were clearly done on Ellis’ part to reflect the interests of people still living and, possibly, confidences once entrusted to her:

About four weeks ago, I was going through some material and I came across these words of Bob’s: “I’ll say this to you, but I wouldn’t say it to anybody else.” Where does that put me? He made that statement several different times. Am I still bound by that confidence? I wonder.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 11 May 1980, Selected Letters 2.41

Also incorporated into the book were drafts of articles that were likely also drawn from the diaries and journals, to whit:

There are two chapters in the first 135 pages I do like, and I think Donald wanted to cut them. One of them described my trip to Cross Plains to apply for the job, and the other was the first faculty meeting. I think both of those chapters tell a lot about Cross Plains. They are the chapters I called you and Kirby about to ask if you didn’t think they should be left in, because they formed a background for Bob’s town, and both of you agreed with me. Both of them had been first drafts of articles about school teaching.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 18 Mar 1984, Selected Letters 2.121

Mrs. Ellis also makes it clear that she was attempting to stick closely to the original diary and journal entries, sometimes to the detriment of readability:

While I was working on it and before I read it, all I could think of was that it does tell a lot more about Bob Howard the man than anyone else has written. What I didn’t realize was that in most cases, I stuck too close to the old diaries and journals; consequently, I wanted to cry while I went over the first 135 pages. How in the world could I fail to see that I was overwriting?
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 18 Mar 1984, Selected Letters 2.120

There are (depending on how you count) 78-80 entries, ranging in length from less than half a page to 11 pages in length. While predominantly told in the first person from Ellis’ perspective in a diary style, she does sometimes include fragments of dialogue and bits of conversation she had with others, in a more novel-esque fashion, which presumably came from her journal entries, as she was in the habit at the time of recording conversations in her journal to practice dialogue technique (SL1.26).

The first entry is dated 1933, and the last is in 1936, after Robert E. Howard’s death. The sequence of entries appears to be linear and some entries are specifically dated while others are vague. Ellis herself admitted that “The diary has a few dates—not enough” in a letter to Glenn Lord (SL2.46). Attempting to map the book directly onto a calendar doesn’t work, and the timeline is alternately compressed or decompressed depending on how prominently Robert E. Howard features in the narrative. We can assume entries not featuring him were edited out or combined, and this, combined with Ellis’ inconsistent tendency to date her entries, is why some of the dating is ambiguous. However, by correlating the events in One Who Walked Alone with other sources, we can map out a rough timeline for the book that corresponds closely with what we know of Novalyne and Bob’s lives in 1933-1936.

For example, we know from newspaper sources and yearbooks that Novalyne Price Ellis graduated from Daniel Baker College in May 1933, and that she was elected to teach at Cross Plains High School in August 1934, the school year beginning 10 September, which agrees with the beginning of One Who Walked Alone. When Novalyne mentions “We had such a large crowd that people had to be turned away” on page 118 agrees with the account given of the Hallowe’en frolic in the Cross Plains Review for 2 November 1934. When Novalyne writes “Bob is still in Temple” on page 182, we can confirm from Howard’s own letters that Bob and Hester Howard spent a month in Temple, TX for medical treatment (A Means to Freedom 2.838).

Further interpreting the content of One Who Walked Alone requires understanding the context of its publication and what other works may have influenced Novalyne Price Ellis’ manuscript, consciously or unconsciously. Interest in Robert E. Howard had begun to revive in the 1950s with the hardback publication of his Conan fiction by Gnome Press, and then seemed to explode in the 1960s and 70s with paperback publication. Science fiction and fantasy fandom, which had long neglected Robert E. Howard, began to organize with fanzines like Amra and The Howard Collector by Glenn Lord, and organizations like the Hyborian Legion and the Robert E. Howard United Press Association. Critical interest in Howard’s fiction led to scholarly interest in Howard the person, and finally, attention was given to his surviving friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues to learn more about Bob Howard.

According to her letters, Novalyne Price Ellis had conceived of a book-length memoir of Bob Howard shortly after his death in 1936:

I have always felt that I owed it to Bob to write about him as a person. After his death in 1936, I began organizing the things I’d written while we were going together and writing new things. However, I only wrote about 30 or 40 pages. I’m sure the book was more about me than about Bob, but I called it THE NEW HAMLET . . . YOUNG AND TRUE. There are a number of reasons I did not finish it: writing it was painful, I was still going with Truett and liked him, but mostly because I have always liked teaching better than writing.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague de Camp, 20 Aug 1977, Selected Letters 1.14 

She certainly still had interest in the subject in the 1940s, as shown by her radioplay “Day of the Stranger” (1947). However, she was at that point employed full time as a teacher with many extracurricular activities, married, and a mother; the project lapsed. Mrs. Ellis came to the attention of fandom and scholars in the 1970s, including correspondence with L. Sprague de Camp and Glenn Lord. According to her letters, the contact with these scholars and interest in Howard and ongoing publications about his life and work, along finally Mrs. Ellis’ retirement from teaching in 1979, encouraged her to revive her project.

At the time she was writing and editing (~1978-1982), the vast majority of Robert E. Howard’s correspondence had not yet been published. Many of the memoirs from Howard’s friends had only been published in various fanzines, some quite rare and obscure. Novalyne Price Ellis did read a few of these things:

I have read very few things about Bob—sometimes a book review or comment—and what I did read didn’t seem to me to be exactly what should have been said. I read one short biography that was filled with what I felt were inaccuracies.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 1 Aug 1979, Selected Letters 2.10

In a later letter, she says this was a book published by Arkham House, which would be Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976) by L. Sprague de Camp, whose biographical chapter on Robert E. Howard is “The Miscast Barbarian.” We also know that Ellis read Harold Preece’s article “Women and Robert Ervin Howard” in Fantasy Crossroads #3 (May 1975), because she mentions it in her letters (ibid.), there are also references to her having read pieces on Robert E. Howard by E. Hoffmann Price and an individual named Troll (SL2.19).

The major accounts of Howard’s life that were relatively available were E. Hoffmann Price’s stories of his two visits to Robert E. Howard in Cross Plains in 1934 and 1935; Tevis Clyde Smith’s Frontier’s Generation, which included an essay on Bob in the enlarged 1980 edition; Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert E. Howard (1976); and a series of biographical works by L. Sprague de Camp: The Miscast Barbarian (1975), a chapter in Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers (1976), and Dark Valley Destiny (1983), written with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Griffin. These are the sources that Mrs. Ellis would most likely have had access to and be influenced by.

Smith was a personal friend of Ellis going back to the 1930s; it is impossible to discount the possibility that his memories or memoirs of Bob Howard influenced her own, and she references his book in One Who Walked Alone (11, 52, 170). While there aren’t any specific incidents that seem drawn from Smith’s memoirs, we can assume any influence was baked in, as he both wrote the introduction and directly influenced the editing. She wrote that when the book was finished:

As you know, I wanted Clyde Smith to read what I had written about Bob before anyone else read it. I visited with him and his wife Rubye in early 1980. 
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Thomas W. Collins, 10 Nov 1988, Selected Letters 1.47

According to Ellis, when Smith reviewed the manuscript, he said: “Novalyne, you’ve got me saying ‘God damn’ too much.” Ellis’ reply was: “I laughed and agreed to cut some of them out.” (Report on a Writing Man & other reminiscences of Robert E. Howard 6). In One Who Walked Alone, Smith never swears worse than “damn.”

E. Hoffmann Price’s memoirs are functionally brief, and while they offer good detail on Robert E. Howard and, to a lesser extent his family, offer little detail on the town or its inhabitants. While she never met E. Hoffmann Price during his 1934 or 1935 visit or afterwards, she does mention that she had heard of the visit (OWWA 114-116, 263). While there are no direct anecdotes repeated in their respective memoirs, there are some interesting parallels. For example, both Price and Ellis mention how Hester Howard acted as a filter on the phone, keeping young women from talking to Bob Howard (The Acolyte Fall 1945, 32; OWWA 41). Likewise, both Price and Ellis discuss Bob talking about enemies (BOD 74, OWWA 257), and both mention that Howard kept a firearm in the glovebox of his car (The Acolyte Summer 1944; OWWA 73).

Ellis entered correspondence with Glenn Lord in the late 1970s, and The Last Celt contained biographic materials including essays by Howard’s friend Harold Preece and E. Hoffmann Price. Regarding this and other of Lord’s publications on Howard, Ellis politely declined to read them:

Thank you for telling me about your book—THE LAST CELT. I haven’t looked for a copy yet because I am busy with my own story about Bob. I don’t want to read anyting [sic] of anyone else’s until I finish. Whatever value my book will have will be Bob as he impressed people in Cross Plains and as I knew him. Naturally, I sincerely feel I knew the real Bob Howard.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Gleen Lord, 18 Jul 1978, Selected Letters 2.5-6

However, in later letters, Mrs. Ellis does mention Preece’s biographical essay on Bob in The Last Celt (SL2.16, 19). Regarding E. Hoffmann Price’s essay:

 In The Last Celt, I thought Price was unnecessarily harsh about Bob too. Consequently, I had wanted my book to present him as he was—a good, kind man, who—if he was a little peculiar—had a right to be under the circumstances.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 27 May 1984, Selected Letters 2.125

Some parallels are to be expected when discussing the same subject, so this doesn’t mean that Mrs. Ellis was cribbing notes off Price but it is important to note those parallels because sometimes knowledge of other memoirs or scholarship can creep into a work. Novalyne Price in 1934-1935, for example, could not know that Robert E. Howard would commit suicide; yet there are passages in One Who Walked Alone which can clearly be read as foreshadowing. For example, there is an encounter with Dr. Howard in what would be about November 1934, on One Who Walked Alone 181-182:

Dr. Howard straightened his shoulders, and his voice was stronger.

“Robert will be all right now, I think.”

That surprised me. “Has he been sick, too?”

Dr. Howard looked closely at me for a moment before he answered. He shook his head. 

“No. Not sick. He is very close to his mother.”

So that is unique? I thought, irritated slightly. I thought of my own mother and grandmother, and wondered how I could ever get along without them. 

“All of us are close to our mothers,” I said. “Somehow we manage to make it without them, I suppose.”

Dr. Howard sighed and looked toward the street at the passing cars. He didn’t see me. “Yes,” he said. “We manage.”

If this exchange happened when the text indicates, it is a significant foreshadowing of events. Mrs. Ellis, compiling and editing the work in the 1970s, clearly realized in hindsight how significant such a conversation would be. Yet we have no way of knowing if this exchange actually take place, when and where and how Novalyne Price Ellis indicated, or if it was fabricated to better fit the narrative. Some evidence in her letters suggests that Ellis definitely moved things around to fit her narrative:

Another thing I want to comment on is the first 168 pages that I have already sent to you. I want to cut some of the things in them for two reasons: 1) I think some later material concerning Bob is more important than some of that presently included. 2) I found a few things that I think should be included in the first part of the book. Some of the things can fit in anywhere, but one or two really need to be included early.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 8 Dec 1980, Selected Letters 2.50

Dark Valley Destiny makes a particularly interesting point of comparison because one of the sources for that first full biography of Robert E. Howard was Mrs. Ellis herself, and was also drawing on E. Hoffmann Price’s memoirs and correspondence. Novalyne and the de Camp’s correspondence reveals a complex relationship, as the de Camps were very interested in her as a source of information about Robert E. Howard but were keen to interpret that information through their own lens when writing about him. For her own part, Novalyne was very aware that the de Camps were writing a biography about Bob at the same time that she was writing a memoir. The result was a kind of cagey rivalry, neither side wanting to give up too much data or make concessions on what material they would or would not use in their own book.

As a consequence, while Dark Valley Destiny covers Bob and Novalyne’s relationship, there are some subtle differences between the two works, both in detail and especially in interpretation. Several exchanges mentioned in both books are given slightly differently (cf. OWWA 39/DVD 314, 317; OWWA 54/DVD 315; OWWA 82/DVD 314-316). The reason for the discrepancy may be a factor of different routes of transmission (Ellis had her journals and her own memories, the de Camps only their conversations and correspondence with Ellis) or different editorial preferences. In some cases, the distinction represents an expansion that might be beyond the original journals. For example, in One Who Walked Alone 160 she says Robert E. Howard “talked about Atlantis,” but in Dark Valley Destiny she is quoted quoting Bob:

“Look, girl! Once upon a time, long ago, there was this vanished civilization of Atlantis, on an island in the ocean….”

In another instance, in One Who Walked Alone, Ellis quoted Howard:

“The Cro-Magnon man had it all over us modern men. He saw a woman he wanted, grabbed her by the hair of the head and dragged her back to his cave.”

In Dark Valley Destiny, Ellis is quoted quoting Howard:

“Look, girl, if this were Conan, he’d bat you down and drag you by the hair in the dust!” (DVD 319-320)

The phrasing echoes Bob’s dialogue in One Who Walked Alone, even though it doesn’t appear there. Were these passages from the journals that didn’t make the cut, something Ellis remembered but wasn’t included in the journals, or a paraphrase of something Bob said? We have no way to know.

If we compare Robert E. Howard as he appears in One Who Walked Alone versus the Howard that emerges from de Camp’s efforts at biography, the results are more subtle than profound. Her approach differs from others: while Bob Howard is presented as somewhat quirky and eccentric, but also a basically decent and normal human being. Ellis does not attempt to provide any of the pseudo-psychological analysis that characterizes de Camp’s works and paints Howard as an emotionally immature man-child with an unhealthy fixation on his mother or latent homosexual.

Novalyne Price Ellis makes no startling or easily falsifiable claims about Bob’s character or history. Neither does she discuss particular anecdotes of which she should have no knowledge, or events that are solely discussed in Dark Valley Destiny et al. and nowhere else. While it isn’t possible to prove Ellis was not influenced by Howard scholarship at the time she compiled and edited One Who Walked Alone, neither are there any red flags that suggest she was definitely drawing on any particular source. 

We’ve already seen how Ellis admitted using pseudonyms for some individuals still alive at the time the book was written, and how the arrangement of the entries suggests that they have been edited to emphasize Robert E. Howard, which affected the timeline of the narrative. There are indications, like the foreshadowing, that some conversations may have been emphasized, moved, paraphrased, or fabricated for narrative purposes.

When Glenn Lord approached Donald M. Grant about publishing One Who Walked Alone, the response he received was:

Grant replied that, while it was interesting, he felt she emphasized herself too much and did not put enough Howard into her work. He wanted her to rewrite and emphasize Howard. At first Novalyne was hesitant about whether she could do it. I encouraged her to try, she knocked out the work, it was acceptable to Grant, and thus we have the result today.
—Glenn Lord to the Cimmerian, 2008; Selected Letters 1.38n39

This broadly matches what we see in the text of One Who Walked Alone; many entries that were largely about Novalyne herself were probably excised to focus on Bob.

There are also many aspects of Ellis’ life that aren’t included in the book. While we do get an account of Ellis’ illness at one point, the book doesn’t cover her general health to any degree of detail; we never know if she’s on her period or feeling a bit under the weather, because these aren’t necessary to the narrative. She never mentions physical intimacy with Robert E. Howard beyond some kissing; is that because their relationship really was chaste, or because she didn’t feel it appropriate to discuss such things (keeping in mind her husband was still alive and well)? We can perhaps judge how much self-censorship Ellis engaged in when she writes in one letter:

It occurred to me that Sprague had probably written something derogatory about Bob and me, for Catherine had asked me (you won’t believe this) if I objected to people reading my diaries and journals because they contained sex! I tried to assure the evil minded woman that such an idea was preposterous!
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 22 Apr 1982, Selected Letters 2.86

It is also worth noting that Ellis fully expected that the book would be cut after she submitted the manuscript and before publication. She even asked directly about this:

Will I be given the privilege of cutting some of the first portion of the manuscript which I have already sent in? After I cut it, the editor can cut what he pleases; however, I should like to discuss the cuts with him. I am particularly interested in making a few cuts and adding a couple of paragraphs. Recently, I found an old diary that I’d been looking for and part of an old scrap book.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 30 Jun 1980, Selected Letters 2.46

One segment we know she wrote but cut was the original introduction to the book (SL2.50). Other changes were likely corrections or proofing changes, for example:

Also, I wanted to ask you to delete the word lustful on page 582. I think it’s better not to use that word because I couldn’t think of a word then or now to describe my feelings about Bob’s overwhelming sense of duty to his mother and father. I should like to just put a comma after the word say. Sometimes it’s hard to describe a situation.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to Glenn Lord, 10 Aug 1981, Selected Letters 2.68

How much was cut from the initial manuscript is unclear, although one letter suggests Donald said “at least 100 pages should be cut” (SL2.87), and that Ellis ultimately cut 125 pages (SL2.90, 110), and then an additional 32 pages on a subsequent editorial pass (SL2.124). Other people who saw the manuscript apparently also suggested changes, although what these are exactly is unclear. Ellis wrote:

When James Turner of Arkham House refused the bookscript about Bob, he took the time to edit it and he also made several suggestions. He said that one incident I had described did not tell anything about the town or about Bob, but that it had so much delightful humor in it he didn’t think any editor would want to delete it. (SL2.95)

Every document is produced for a purpose, stated or unstated, every author has their bias and their blindspots, and some disagreement between sources should be expected, simply because different people recalling the same events at different times and from different perspectives are going to remember things differently. Based on Novalyne Price Ellis’ letters and other writings, One Who Walked Alone was her honest effort to present Robert E. Howard as she had known him—but what it is not is an exact transcription of primary source materials.

In the end, Ellis’ work might be more properly categorized as creative nonfiction than as either a straight memoir or a work of semiautobiographical fiction like Howard’s Post Oaks & Sand Roughs. Its purpose is to accurately represent a certain time, place, persons, relationships, and events. Yet to do that, Ellis had to go beyond just a dry recitation of facts or or raw transcriptions from her diaries and journals; she constructed and presented a narrative for readers, and while that narrative is based in fact, it still represents her particular take on events, and should be read as such. Scholars can still cite and draw from One Who Walked Alone, but they should do it with an understanding that what they are citing has been filtered, rewritten, edited, and presented to depict a particularly human image of Robert E. Howard, as a direct counter to some of the depictions of Howard as mentally ill or freakish.

When she saw how the de Camps were using the information she provided them to depict Bob Howard in a way she did not agree with, Novalyne Price Ellis noted:

I, who have always liked biographies, feel now that biographies are about the feelings and emotions of the people writing them instead of the subject.
—Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprade de Camp, 20 Aug 1977, Selected Letters 1.14

Which is demonstrably true, and in One Who Walked Alone, she makes no attempt to conceal her own feelings and emotions. 

Originally presented as part of the Glenn Lord Symposium at Howard Days 2025.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

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