Moby Dick: Creative Platypus
After a drawing by Rockwell Kent Marker on Strathmore Toned Tan A whale-ship was my Yale college and my Harvard. -Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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Howard's Conan: Final Thoughts: The Platypus Reads Part CCCIX
Well, I've done it: I've finally finished Robert E. Howard's entire Conan oeuvre. The journey has been several years long, and I've also taken side trips to cover Howard creations Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn, but I have finally reached the finish. What do I say now that I have reached the end? When I began this journey, one of my friends quipped that Conan should be known as "the venerially diseased" instead of "the barbarian". Others told me that they had simply given up along the way -the racism and misogyny were too much. I did give up on Howard's younger contemporary, Fritz Leiber, for about that reason. Having read to the end, I can confidently say that these criticisms are true: Conan is not a good man, and Robert E. Howard was a cynical nihilist out to earn a buck -but that's not the whole story. Conan and his creator also reflect the realities of the Great Depression and a life on America's not-so-tamed former frontier...
Conan: Beyond the Black River: The Platypus Reads Part CCCVIII
This post will cover two of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories: Beyond the Black River and The Black Stranger . Prior posts on Conan and his world can be found by following the "Howard" tag at the bottom of this post. Beyond the Black River : The last phase of Howard's Conan stories find him transitioning from the world of oriental adventures to the American frontier. Beyond the Black River owes more to books like Buchanan's A Salute to Adventurers than to Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse . Nonetheless, Howard still preserves the ancient world setting by calquing the American frontier onto the Roman frontier and cover the whole thing with a facade of Hyborian places and peoples. The author's commitment to side with barbarism over civilization comes to the fore here and the lesson seems to be that of the noble savage showing up the folly and weakness of society. One wonders, given Howard's deification of the "barbarian," how ...