SPEAR AND FANG

After Robert E. Howard's passing, Glenn Lord became the agent of his literary estate. Lord is primarily responsible for keeping Howard's work alive and was instrumental in getting his Conan stories re-published in various editions. He is famously known for tracking down Howard's trunk of manuscripts to the home of fellow pulp author E. Hoffman Price. The trunk included hundreds of unpublished pages of work.

In the 1960's Lord published eighteen issues of THE HOWARD COLLECTOR which contained, at the time, many rare stories and poems by Howard. In issue #7 (Winter 1965) Lord re-printed Howard's first professionally-published short story, "Spear and Fang" (WEIRD TALES, July 1925). Howard had received innumerable rejects until editor Farnsworth Wright "took a chance" on the young writer, for which he received the princely sum of $16. Years later, Howard wrote a letter to Wright, saying: "You gave me my start in the racket by buying my first story — “Spear and Fang.” I was eighteen years old at the time. Pounding out a decent living at the writing game is no snap — but the average man’s life is no snap, whatever he does."

Also included here is his poem, "Cimmeria", and along with "Spear and Fang", were foreshadowings of what was to come from the keys of his Underwood No. 5 typewriter. Commenting on his poem to science-fiction/fantasy author Emil Petaja, Howard wrote: "Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a mist of winter rain."