RINGSIDE WITH ROBERT E. HOWARD
By Brian Leno
Now available!
Brian Leno returns with his second Robert E. Howard TriplePunchPack — only this time the emphasis isn’t on literary criticism. The game is biography. The Life of Robert E. Howard. Lives of the Boxers. Both subjects lifelong interests for this award-winning Howard scholar.
Leno establishes those longtime bona fides in “Down the Rabbit Hole,” in which he reveals details of his first trip to Cross Plains — in 1967, when he was eleven years old — riding the initial shock waves of the phenomenon known as the Howard Boom.
Standing inside Howard’s home in 2007, during the annual festival held in honor of the author who created Conan the barbarian, Leno pauses to reflect on many aspects of his life, while also reporting on the fan tumult surging around him. And of course he visits Howard’s grave. He stands in the ruins of the local ice house where Howard once boxed himself.
“Jim Tully and Robert E. Howard: Beggars of Life” broods over the Texan’s fascination with Tully, novelist and Hollywood reporter, once a hobo, a boxer — and during Howard’s lifetime one of the best-selling writers in America. Why is Tully now so completely forgotten while a man who never had a book appear before his early death maintains a lasting international reputation?
“Ernest Hemingway, Robert E. Howard and Battling Siki: Typewriters and Fists” covers the life and career of Siki, “Wild Man of the Boulevards,” the first African to win a major boxing championship. This pioneering figure influenced moments in fiction by Hemingway and REH. Hemingway and Howard — both suicides.
(And as an eBook eXtra Leno tosses a new survey into the ring — “A Texas Cowboy in Chicago” — on local fighter “Kid” Dula and Howard’s predictions for his climb to a title. No one else sits at the ringside known to Robert E. Howard with the authority of Brian Leno.)
Print Length: 82 pages
Kindle: $2.99
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