Howard might have lit his pioneering torch in an unpromising hinterland, but he kindled imaginations around the world. That he lived and died with no inkling of the passion that his passionate storytelling would eventually ignite, or the power with which artists would respond to his power, is intolerable. He has created many, many readers and not a few writers as well, the more conscientious of whom have been determined, not to write like Howard but rather to write, like Howard. Brian Attebery accords L. Frank Baum, imperfections and all, the status of--ur Grimm and our Andersen, the man who introduced Americans to their own dreams.--Despite being an imperfect man and writer, Howard told perfectly wonderful stories that reintroduced twentieth-century Americans (and much of the world) to their own nightmares--but also to the chance of triumph, however hard-won and soon-lost, over those nightmares.
By now our confidence that Robert E. Howard could not help thinking or writing five classically American things before breakfast each morning must be apparent.--writer who wishes to produce something both American and fantastic--is for Attebery compelled to--ove against the currents, restoring what has been lost over the years or finding eddies of tradition that have resisted the general erosion of the marvelous.--It-- time to acknowledge that Howard, whose sense of loss was at least as keen as his other five senses, was eminently qualified to undertake such tasks. So here-- to a viable, meritocratic, and open-audition-offering pantheon, one into which this author will not have to fight his way once his ability to write his way in is better known. His induction will leave the pantheon more sensitive to the call of the wild and the pall of the mild; more tragic but also more comic; more fantastic but also more realistic; brawnier, but more poetic; more physical, but more haunted. No other country in the world could have produced a Robert E. Howard, and, regrettably, few other countries would have been as slow to realize his stature and significance. But as the afterlives of earlier classic writers--work have taught us, late is still much, much better than never.