I am rereading Robert E Howard’s Conan yarns in publication order, and noting how they have improved with age. Often dismissed as a mere boyish adventure tales, adult eyes rereading these alleged boy’s stories will see depth to them.
The more famous critics of Howard’s work who dismiss him as a crank can be dismissed themselves as hacks. A hack is a dishonest writer who gives the reader propaganda rather than a sincere opinion on the merits or demerits of the work. Propaganda is an attempt to promulgate a worldview via deception, as when a man promulgates a political or philosophical stance under the guise of discussing a sword and sorcery story.
The most famous hack ergo the one deserving the most obloquy, is Damon Knight, whom I have previously discussed and been disgusted by (see here:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2017/11/conan-and-the-critic/)
My meditation on the meaning of Conan in general, and my review of
Phoenix on the Sword in particular, is here:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2017/11/conan-phoenix-on-the-sword/
This is the interwar period, with Communists, Nazis, Fascists and socialists already committing atrocities beyond any historical precedent, democracies in the West groaning under a government-created Great Depression, faith in the free markets and in civilization itself fallen to perhaps its most cynical low.
In popular entertainment, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and other iconic figures destined to outlast their generation were on that new apparatus, the radio; KING KONG was due to open later that year, as was DUCK SOUP starring the Marx Brothers. Edgar Rice Burroughs, in the second decade of his career, had just published
Lost on Venus, and
Tarzan and the Lion Men, and was busily penning
Swords of Mars. Tom Swift was in the third decade of his career. He had just invented a giant magnet and was about to invent his television detector.
Let us turn to
The Scarlet Citadel. It was first published in WEIRD TALES, January of 1933. It is the second published story in the oeuvre, immediately following
Phoenix on the Sword, published in the December issue of the previous year.
