In addition to
his reading, Robert Howard had a passion for oral storytelling.
It is well attested that he frequently told his stories aloud
as he typed them, annoying his neighbors no end with the racket
he often made right through the night. His buddies in Cross Cut
also recall that he liked to have them play out stories he made
up, just as he would later regale the literary friends of his
adulthood with his more elaborate tales. He seemed never to tire
of telling stories, though generally he would not talk about material
on which he was actually working. He told his friend Novalyne
Price that once the story was told, he had difficulty getting
it on paper. Sometimes, however, his oral tales would provide
the inspiration for stories he would later write. Howard also
relished listening to others tell stories. His letters reveal
how, as a young boy, he was thrilled and terrified by the ghost
tales of the family cook, a former slave, and those of his grandmother.
He would also seek out old-timers and persuade them to share their
memories of the pioneer days. It may well be the quality of the
well-spun yarn that gives Howard’s stories their immediacy.
Howard seems to have decided upon a literary career at an early
age. In a letter to Lovecraft he says that his first story was
written when he was “nine or ten,” and a former postmistress
at Burkett recalls that he began writing stories about this time
and expressed an intention of becoming a writer. He submitted
his first story for publication when he was only 15, and made
his first professional sale - ‘Spear and Fang,’ a
short story in which a Cro-Magnon rescues his mate from a Neanderthal
- at the ripe old age of 18. Howard always insisted that he chose
writing as his profession simply because it gave him the freedom
to be his own boss: “I could have studied law, or gone into
some other occupation, but none offered me the freedom writing
did - and my passion for freedom is almost an obsession.... Personal
liberty may be a phantom, but I hardly think anybody would deny
that there is more freedom in writing than there is in slaving
in an iron foundry, or working - as I have worked - from 12 to
14 hours, seven days a week, behind a soda fountain. I have worked
as much as eighteen hours a day at my typewriter, but it was work
of my own choosing.... I’ve always had a honing to make
my living by writing, ever since I can remember, and while I haven’t
been a howling success in that line, at least I’ve managed
for several years now to get by without grinding at some time
clock-punching job.” Whatever his reasons, once Howard had
determined upon his path, he was completely committed to it, despite
the obstacles. As he later said to H.P. Lovecraft, “...It
is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign
and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast; a
profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores
of Europe.... The idea of a man making his living by writing seemed,
in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes
myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at
the age of fifteen... having only the vaguest ideas of procedure,
I began working on the profession I had chosen.”
The Cross Plains school only went through to tenth grade at the
time Robert Howard attended, but he needed to complete the eleventh
grade to qualify for college admission. Thus in the fall of 1922,
when Robert was 16, he and his mother moved to Brownwood, a larger
town that served as the county seat for Brown County, so that
he could finish high school. It was there that Howard met Truett
Vinson and Clyde Smith, who would remain his friends until the
end of his life. They were the first of his friends to encourage
his interest in literature and writing, and Smith, especially,
shared Howard’s fondness for poetry. It was also at Brownwood
High that Howard first enjoyed the thrill of being a published
author: two of his stories won cash prizes and publication in
the high school paper, The Tattler (December 22, 1922), and three
more were printed during the spring term.