Howard said he began buying pulp magazines at fifteen, in the summer of 1921, though he had probably been reading them for some time. His favorite publications seem to have been Adventure and Argosy, the two leading pulp fiction magazines of that era. Before Weird Tales began publication in 1923, there was no magazine devoted solely to weird fiction. The young Howard was a voracious reader of adventure fiction, an inclination that would be true all his life. Argosy and Adventure specialized in historical and adventure tales, and traces of influence of all the major contributors to those magazines–we may cite Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Arthur D. Howden-Smith–can be detected in the writings of Howard. It was thus natural that when Howard began writing fiction on a (more or less) professional basis in 1921, just after having discovered these magazines, it was in these authors that he found his first inspiration. The Texan thus wrote a number of tales clearly derived from Mundy, and borrowed from Burroughs or, at a later date, from Lamb and Howden-Smith.
It was Howard scholar and Wandering Star editor Rusty Burke who unearthed the influence Paul L. Anderson had on a young Robert E. Howard. Anderson (1880–1956), now completely forgotten, had several novelettes published in Argosy in the early 1920s, beginning with The Son of the Red God in the 31 January 1920 issue. The tale was preceded by a note which explained how he had found a Crô-Magnon parchment in a cave in France and that his story was nothing more than a translation from the original. The subject of the tale is a favorite of the era: how the Crô-Magnons supplanted the Neanderthals. That Howard enjoyed Anderson is attested by his borrowing of several names, found in a series of tales and poems probably dating from 1922 or 1923. Anderson’s “En-ro of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Dying Sun” are echoed in Howard’s “Am-ra of the Ta-an” and “Land of the Morning Sun,” among several other borrowings. Howard’s first professionally published story, Spear and Fang written in 1924, shows remarkable similarity to Anderson’s first tale.
Howard wrote several stories or poems dealing, directly or indirectly, with Am-ra of the Ta-an. In one of these, of which only two pages have come to us, Am-ra has a dispute with a woman named Ah-lala. Both names are echoed in the future Kull stories, with Am-ra appearing in the first Kull story and a Lala-ah appearing in the longest of the unfinished tales. How Am-ra the Crô-Magnon could become Am-ra the Atlantean was explained by Howard himself in a 1928 letter to his friend Harold Preece:
About Atlantis–I believe something of the sort existed, though I do not especially hold any theory about a high type of civilization existing there–in fact, I doubt that. But some continent was submerged away back, or some large body of land, for practically all peoples have legends about a flood. And the Cro-Magnons appeared suddenly in Europe, developed to a high state of primitive culture; there is no trace to show that they came up the ladder of utter barbarism in Europe. Suddenly their remains are found supplanting the Neanderthal Man, to whom they have no ties of kinship whatever. Where did they originate? Nowhere in the known world, evidently. They must have originated and developed through the different basic stages of evolution in some land which is not now known to us.
The occultists say that we are the fifth–I believe–great sub-race. Two unknown and unnamed races came, then the Lemurians, then the Atlanteans, then we. They say the Atlanteans were highly developed. I doubt it. I think they were simply the ancestors of the Cro-Magnon man, who by some chance, escaped the fate which overtook the rest of the tribes.
All my views on the matter I included in a long letter to the editor to whom I sold a tale entitled “The Shadow Kingdom,” which I expect will be published as a foreword to that story–if ever. This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis. (Selected Letters, 1923–1930, Necronomicon Press, 1989, p. 20)
Sadly, the letter to the editor has not survived. However, Howard’s “views on the matter” may be discerned in a story which had been rejected in March 1926 by Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales. A lengthy part of Men of the Shadows is devoted to early history and prehistory, and notably to Atlantis, Lemuria and the Crô-Magnons:
To those islands came the Nameless Tribe [i.e., the Picts]…they were the first Men…Then the Lemurians, the Second Race, came into the northern land…Now the Atlanteans (Crô-Magnons) were the Third Race. They were physical giants, finely made men, who inhabited caves and lived by the chase…then from the North came the Celts, bearing sword and spears of bronze…And they were the Fourth Race. (Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, Del Rey, 2005, pp. 23–26)
The “great sub-races” Howard alludes to suggest he was familiar with the ideas of Helena Blavatsky and Theosophy, either having read the books or having heard about these theories from his father or a friend who was interested in occultism. The most important point of the letter (and of the Bran story) however, is the fact that Howard was convinced that there was a linkage between the Crô-Magnons and Atlantis, and that the latter was historical, an empire belonging to Earth’s past, not an imaginary one. As early as 1923 Howard had casually mentioned Atlantis as a historical empire, contemporary to Accad, in a letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith. The likeliest source for Howard’s idea of an Atlantean/Crô-Magnon connection is Lewis Spence, a British folklorist. Spence was convinced of the former existence of the continent of Atlantis and wrote several books in which he “proved” his theory. His The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and Atlantis in America (1925) may very well have influenced Howard. The identification of Atlantis as the source of Crô-Magnon man and his culture seems to have been original with Spence.
The Kull series was thus born at the time Howard discarded the entirely “historical” setting–i.e., Atlantis–in favor of one mixing the historical and the imaginary. This is why the first Kull story is also the last of the Am-ra the Atlantean tales. Both characters are very similar: Kull is “a counterpart of [Am-ra], except for the fact that he [i]s slightly larger–taller, a thought deeper of chest and broader of shoulder.” Kull is basically a character who wants to flee reality–his reality–in favor of the pursuit of what is presented as a dream in that first story, a country dreamed of, spoken of, but otherwise unknown: Valusia. When Howard dropped Atlantis for Valusia, he dropped Am-ra for Kull. In a nutshell, he stopped writing “historical” tales in favor of fantasy tales.
The name “Valusia” appears to be a Howardian coinage. It appears very early in the young author’s career in Khoda Khan’s Tale, an incomplete story dating from 1922 or 1923. In that tale, protagonist Frank Gordon is trying to locate an ancient African city, supposedly once inhabited by a strange race of white people. Gordon first discovers “a temple erected to the elephant,” quickly followed by another, fresher looking one, which he soon discovers to be much more ancient than the other:
It consisted merely of a stone wall, round in shape, with an opening at one place. It had no roof. In the center there was a great, carved serpent of stone, coiled on a stone pedestal which [was] decorated by carvings of other, smaller serpents. The stone wall was also decorated by snake-carvings. Gordon went over the ruins carefully. He seemed very much interested and slightly puzzled. “The Carthaginians did not mention another race,” said he, “yet the race that erected this snake-temple did not erect the elephant-temple we found at the edge of the swamp. They represent two distinct forms of architecture, so distinct that it is scarcely possible that the same race erected both temples.” (The Coming of El Borak, Cryptic Publications, 1987, pp. 47–48)