https://howardhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/onion-tops-002-web1.pdf
Tevis Clyde Smith & more…….https://howardhistory.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/onion-tops-002-web1.pdf
HOWARD, ROBERT ERVIN (1906–1936).Robert E. Howard, writer, the only child of Dr. Isaac Mordecai and Hester Jane (Ervin) Howard, was born on January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, and educated in Central Texas schools, including the school at Cross Plains, where he lived most of his life. For one year, at the age of twelve, he lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, while his father did additional medical study. Because Cross Plains did not offer the final year of high school he and his mother lived in a boarding house in Brownwood while he completed his senior year. After graduating from Brownwood High School in 1923 Howard returned to Cross Plains and worked at a variety of odd jobs. In 1925 he returned to Brownwood to obtain a business certificate from Howard Payne College. He received the one-year certificate in 1927 but never used it. During his year at Howard Payne he wrote stories for the school newspaper and for the Daniel Baker College newspaper and sold his first story to Weird Tales, a popular pulp magazine. Encouraged by his entry into the pulp market and by his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, who printed Howard’s earliest “published” works on a small portable press, Howard resolved to support himself by writing and went on to author all sorts of formula fiction including fight stories, ghost stories, historical adventures, and heroic fantasies. In Cross Plains Howard’s neighbors complained that his typewriter kept them awake at night while he churned out stories for a penny a word. He reportedly earned $500 in one month during the Great Depression, when the local bank president earned less than a third that amount. Howard bought a new Chevrolet for cash in 1935, supposedly the only person in Cross Plains who could afford to do so.
Read more here: https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/howard-robert-ervin