The Great Debate: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard  by Brian Murphy If you’re interested in taking a look under the hood of sword-and-sorcery and what makes it tick, a great place to start is the letters of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Today these are readily available in a highly recommended two-volume set published by Hippocampus Press entitled A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (1930-1936). Spanning more than 900 printed pages, this correspondence covers each man’s personal interests, history, literature, and politics, and paints a vivid picture of Howard’s 1930s Texas landscape and Lovecraft’s northeastern United States. The letters reach a crescendo in a spirited philosophical and political debate that included a discussion on the merits of civilization vs. barbarism. This spar of thoughts helped spur the development of the Conan stories and by extension the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. Howard had already written what is generally regarded as the first sword-and-sorcery story, “The Shadow Kingdom,” in the late 1920s, but his correspondence with Lovecraft pushed him to new heights. While Lovecraft astutely observed of Howard’s stories “the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them,” Lovecraft’s exchange of ideas fomented and helped Howard crystallize an underlying thematic richness that elevated his stories above common pulp fare. The exchange began in 1930 when Howard, having just finished reading “The Rats in the Walls” in the pages of Weird Tales, wrote a letter to the magazine that both praised the tale and offered a mild criticism, noting that a phrase Lovecraft used for the story was Gaelic, not Cymric, and an historical anachronism. Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright passed the letter on to Lovecraft, sparking a wonderful correspondence that lasted all the way until Howard’s untimely death in 1936.  The early letters are less an exchange of ideas than a pleasant discussion of like-minded peers, as the two shared likes/dislikes, working writer woes, and news of the day. But gradually the letters turned to an exchange of thoughts on the political and metaphysical, including the true nature of humanity. Howard was stung when Lovecraft in a January 1933 letter wrote, “Naturally, there are primitive, retarded, and atavistic types to whom barbarism would be better suited than civilization. Behind every argument in favor of barbarism, it seems...