Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Gouged Eyes and Chawed Ears: The Rough and Tumble World of Breckenridge Elkins



Have you read A Gent from Bear Creek and the rest of the Breckenridge Elkins saga? If not, you oughta! I like everything Howard wrote (except maybe the detective stories), but this series is my favorite.

This is a paper read by Jeffrey Shanks at the 2011 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference.

4 comments:

TC said...

Some critic (maybe Manly Wade Wellman, but I'm not certain) once said that REH's tongue-in-cheek Westerns were the cream of his writing, and that his best-known works (Conan, Kull, and the other sword & sorcery stories) were the dregs.

Evan Lewis said...

I wouldn't go that far, but there ARE the most fun.

Anonymous said...

Aw, what would you expect from the author of Silver John?
I'm very fond of Wellman's work, but he's plain wrong.

REH's humorous westerns are, at their best, laugh-out-loud slapstick.
His sword & sorcery tales are, at their best, fresh distillations of myth.

John

Shay said...

Yes, I've read the Breck Elkins stories. Tried to write one in the idiom, once. The language is great fun.