Abstract

Glad Lovecraft has enjoyed his travels on the East Coast; on not meaning to direct any resentment towards Lovecraft; on how Lovecraft and Howard have been speaking past each other, and trying to clear things up, regarding relative values that humans place on various attributes, leading into a discussion on morals and civilization, and on animals possessing attributes of the human race; on governments (with support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt); on freedom (with asides on the economics of farming), the idealization of the frontier versus the city, and of desiring to have been born a century ago; on violence, morality, and crime and bloodshed in Texas (with mention of feuds and fences, and of Easterners not respecting the laws and customs of the West, with an anecdote of Billy the Kid and John Chusum) leading to an aside on gun control (with anecdotes on laws against oranges and wire-cutters) and a story of Billy the Kid, another on Lord Adair (and his wife, Lady Adair, the Cow Queen of the Panhandle) and Cape Willingham, another on Bill Tilghman, and others; recapitulating his points with further examples of crime and police violence out east and in the midwest (with reference to Al Capone, Nazis, Communists, labor strikes, etc.); a disparaging line on Germany; on radios and various programs and speakers he has heard (Irvin S. Cobb, Mahatma Gandhi, Æ, Sax Rohmer, Alexander Woolcott, etc.); returning to barbarism and civilization (and sickness and medical research, citing some statistics for death by accident and non-fatal injuries); more on artistic and cultural values versus "the basic standards of human development" (with a focus on a law against hitch-hiking), seguing into a brief discussion of fascism; on comparing Jim Corbett and Michaelangelo; on Lovecraft's comments regarding Harry Houdini (with an anecdote of his cousin Dave Thomas who became a trapeze artist and died from a fall, and another about a teacher suggesting he get a career in biology); denying he feels at an intellectual disadvantage; on the letter being delayed due to a car accident involving a flag pole; praise for "The Thing on the Doorstep," and amusement at the ruckus in the Fantasy Fan between Forrest J. Ackerman, Clark Ashton Smith, and others; thanks for "Cats and Dogs," and more on his own cats, two of which died from cholera.

Note: In A Means to Freedom and the Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, a footnote contains an excerpt of a letter from Lindsey Tyson to L. Sprague de Camp on the car accident; this is categorized as XXX-0029.

Cited By

TBD

Included In

• A Means to Freedom
• Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard