EXTRACTS: The Complete Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 © The Book Palace (416 PAGES in Full edition)

A1 H YBORIAN G ENESIS P ART III Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories by Patrice Louinet As he was completing A Witch Shall Be Born , Robert E. Howard probably felt that he could sell almost any Conan story he submitted to Weird Tales. By 1934, after several years of hardship, including two years early in his career during which he did not sell a single story, Howard had become one of the stars of the magazine. Witch was, according to editor Farnsworth Wright, the “best” of the Conan stories submitted to date; praise for Howard and his Conan stories could be found in the letter column of almost every issue of Weird Tales, and, by far the most revealing factor, the Texan was present in ten of the twelve issues published in 1934, eight of these featuring Conan, with the last four winning cover privilege, an impressive record. Howard had been immersed in Conan for months: People of the Black Circle had been written in February and March; The Hour of the Dragon was begun just afterward and sent to its intended British publisher on May 20; and A Witch Shall Be Born had been completed by early June. Howard’s sole respite during those months was the short visit of his colleague E. Hoffmann Price in April. Early in June, then, Howard took his first vacation in a long time. He later informed his correspondent August Derleth that he had “completed several weeks of steady work,” and told him that “a friend and I took a brief trip into southern New Mexico and extreme western Texas; saw the Carlsbad Caverns, a spectacle not to [be] duplicated on this planet, and spent a short time in El Paso. First time I’d ever been there....” The friend in question was Truett Vinson, one of Howard’s best friends since high school, about whom more later. The two men left Cross Plains, Howard’s hometown, in early June and were gone for a week. That the trip proved enjoyable is attested by mentions of it in almost all of Howard’s letters of the following weeks, with the visit to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico as the high point of the short holidays. Howard was particularly impressed by these natural wonders and waxed at length about them to his correspondents, notably H. P. Lovecraft: I can not describe the fantastic wonders of that great cavern. You must see it yourself to appreciate it. It lies high up among the mountains, and I never saw skies so blue and clear as those that arch titanically above those winding trails up which the traveller must labor to reach the entrance of the Cavern. They are of a peculiarly deep hue beggaring attempts at description. The entrance of the Cavern is gigantic, but it is dwarfed by the dimensions of the interior. One descends seemingly