“Had I known” that his son had talked with the nurse, his father admitted, “I might have prevented this, because I know now that he fully had made up his mind not to see his mother die.”Īlthough he had written hundreds if not thousands of deaths in his numerous pulp stories, Robert E. In talking with the nurse, Howard had avoided alerting either his father or the attending doctor. “I was watching Robert as this was premeditated and I knew it but I did not think that he would kill himself before his mother went,” his father reported. He especially did not want to witness her death.

Howard, a local physician, had been carefully monitoring his son’s behavior, as he had been very open about wanting to commit suicide should something happen to his mother. His mother, Hester, died thirty-some hours later, never having regained consciousness. Howard lived for eight hours before finally succumbing to the self-inflicted wound. The bullet entered above his temple and exited behind and slightly above his left ear. Less than ten minutes after hearing the diagnosis, Howard walked out to his car, took a revolver from the passenger compartment, rolled up the car windows, and shot himself in the head. She would never regain consciousness, and she would never again recognize him. She had no chance to recover from the coma, the nurse informed him. He had been sitting vigilantly with her for nearly three weeks as her health-never good-had declined precipitously. On the following Thursday morning, June 11, 1936, Howard asked the hospice nurse about the health of his mother, who had, only days earlier, fallen into a coma. Howard, age thirty, paraphrased some lines from Viola Garvin’s “House of Caesar” and typed on his typewriter:Īll fled-all done, so lift me on the pyre. Shortly before his own death, pulp writer and somewhat maddened genius Robert E. This essay appears in the Spring issue of Modern Age.

Conan the barbarian howard re