When in need of REH information, bibliographic, biographic, pretty much any facet, feel free to contact myself or the other board members of The Robert E. Howard Foundation, a charitable non-profit corporation that is getting the rest of the works into print, and helping out with REH’s home town of Cross Plains, TX. http://www.rehfoundation.org. If you haven’t read them yet, the Collected Letters are particularly insightful.

And for the record, your statement about his suicide is spot on with my own conclusion, after looking at as much information as I could lay hands on. His father, the doctor, lived with them as well, though he was on the road quite often.

I wonder how many answers may be provided by looking at Howard’s relationship with his own mother. Didn’t he spend most of his short life living alone with her?

Yes. I don’t know that much about his mother, other than that he committed suicide when she died. (But that makes it sound as though she was more important to him emotionally than perhaps she was; the spirit in which he committed suicide, I gather, was less “I’m going to kill myself because life without mother will be unbearable” and more “I’m going to kill myself because my life has been generally unbearable for a good long while, and only my obligation to take care of my ailing mother has kept me from an early escape.”)

about how Bush and Abramhoff want the “market to be the nexus of society”

At last those deeply closeted libertarians have been outed.

Oh, I’ve remembered another — Ayesha in “Road of the Eagles.” I didn’t initially think of her because, although she’s handy with a knife, she’s not strictly a “warrior woman,” at least by profession; instead she falls into the category of “scheming slave girl,” a role usually assigned in genre fiction of this period either to villains or to rescue/ravish objects. But Ayesha is neither; she’s a sympathetically portrayed, courageous woman, with a cool head and an iron will, who makes all the plans as her male lover tags along in a daze. In keeping with Howard’s avoidance of fitting all his heroines into a uniform mold, Ayesha does it all out of love for her male rescue object , giving her a different motivation from all the others.

I wonder how many answers may be provided by looking at Howard’s relationship with his own mother. Didn’t he spend most of his short life living alone with her?

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/8/stream

Frank also has a new book which he discusses with the same theme.