Robert E Howard was eventually owed several months in back pay from Weird Tales so he eventually stopped writing sword and sorcery for them and went to another magazine where he focused on Westerns.
What do you think of this decision? Do you think he was too focused on the market? What would you have done if you were in his position?
Grab my trusty sword, kick the cornerstones out from under the delinquent payers castle, behead or otherwise dismember them as they fled the collapse, then drag their women home for my personal harem.
Duh.
Considering that Howard died 89 years ago, I doubt that anyone on these forums can offer a useful answer to that question.
The world we live in is drastically different from the one Howard lived and died in. We have a lot more tools at our disposal than people had back then. The most important difference, in my eyes, is that we can reach and communicate with so many people today. Owed several months of back pay? There are so many things you could do: look up your options on Google, make some posts on social media asking for advice, create a GoFundMe campaign to help you finance a lawsuit, switch to Patreon, create a Kickstarter campaign for a book of stories, etc.
Howard had access to none of that.
What I think is that this is a weird thing to focus on. Howard was a deeply troubled individual who ended his own life at the age of 30.
Iâm curious: whatâs the motivation behind this topic?
Humour aside, the actual question that you are asking here is quite ridiculous. Howard was a writer providing stories on commission for a magazine. That was his source of income. He was not some independently wealthy gentleman who could pick and choose what to write, and he received during his life only a fraction of what these stories would later prove to be worth.
To put it another way - if you were working for a living for an employer and your employer chose to stop paying you for months of work that you had already done, and another employer offered you a job, would you be âtoo focused on the marketâ if you accepted?
I honestly believed his works ended when he died.
The motivation was thinking about how Robert E Howard still effects things today like this forum. I was thinking about his legacy, it seems as if Lovecraft is everywhere in the bookstores. There are several complete editions of his work that you can buy in hardback. There have been no complete editions for the work of Robert E Howard. The Conan stories can be bought in several different anthologies but they have not been packaged into one book yet. I hope that provides clarification.
Now that is an interesting discussion! I wonder if this is because Howardâs work appeals to a more niche audience than Lovecraftâs, or if thereâs a different explanation that has to do with how their works were published and marketed.
Sadly, I donât have the time to devote to this, so I hope that someone more skilled at historical research (and enough time on their hands) will provide some insights here.
Thereâs this hardcover book that I have. It has lots of stories but I assumed they were all there because complete is in the name. But I havenât double-checked.
The Complete Chronicles of Conan Hardcover
What are some of the Conan stories I should look for that might not be in there?
As for meaning complete of all his work and not just Conan I bet that would have to be multi-volume effort. The above Conan is pretty big and heavy 
The same company put out a Lovecraft hardcover that I also have. Also big and heavy.
I bought that book for Zebâs birthday a few years ago. Also bought myself a copy, along with a novel based on the 1982 movie and a making of book. Loads of Frazettaâs and Ron Cobbâs art.
Ahh, perhaps they did then. I was just trying to Lovecraftâs complete fiction hardcovers include his non-myth of stories as well as his poetry. Howard wrote a lot more than just the Conan stories. He wrote horror stories and several sports and boxing stories. In the pulp era, one had to be prolific. If some of these stories could be collected in their own volumes is a hardcover that would be good for Howardâs legacy. The pulp authors could easily write 1 million words a year. A lot of these authors were simply lost to history after literally working their fingers to the bone. They wrote under several pseudonyms and sometimes submitted several different stories to the same issue of the magazine using different pseudonyms.
Howardâs first story that includes âKull The Conquerorâ entitled âKingdom of Shadowsâ which begins the Conan universe is actually also considered a Lovecraft mythos story.
To put this into a but more of context, Robert E. Howard had his first story published in 1925, and he died in 1936. However, and this is a major part of the issue, the GREAT DEPRESSION was going on in America from 1929 to 1941. So when you consider that Weird Tales was no consistently paying on time, and money in general was a major issue NATION WIDE, can you honestly wonder why he would chose to move to a magazine that would offer a more stable paycheck even if it was for a different genera? Especially considering that he was (likely) shelling out money for his mothers medical bills (it was well documented that his parents were not on the best of terms for many years before her death, which was the same day as his own).
That is darn good reason @Oduda. I read Howardâs books around 1974 my dad had those and and the Lord of the Rings along with some interesting spy novels at that time wouldnât have considered any of the authors back stories all access would have been in print. Makes you wonder how we learned anything back then in a way it might be worse now 
Love the books may have copies some where unfortunately have not read a book since late 90`s damn cable
I read every day. At work. 
I also write every day as well. 
Thatâs⊠before I was born. 
I believe I started to ready the works of Robert E. Howard back in the late 80âs or early 90âs. I cannot say exactly which year.
I collected this set when they came out, not just the ones for Conan but also Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane and other Robert E. Howard collected stories because they were the original unedited stories without the taint of L. Sprague DeCamp or others. I still have them sitting above my desk 
for easy access.
Nice collection!
This documentary might appeal to some of you, even if it only touches on the actual topic of this thread in passing. (Perhaps it will soon be available again in the original version with a significantly higher resolution, or in HD, on the arte YouTube channel - then also in German. For those who donât speak French, the audio track is available in the form of different subtitles on YouTube.)
Sweet
