in the pulps for the last fifty years." On Howard in particular, he wrote: An exception to this, in King's opinion (again from Danse Macabre) was the author's Southern Gothic horror story "Pigeons From Hell." King referred to this work as "one of the finest horror stories of our century." In the foreword to "Two-Gun Bob", a collection of essays on the subject of Howard, fellow fantasy fiction writer, Michael Moorcock, wrote: "The ability to paint a complex scene with a few expert brushstrokes remains Howard's greatest talent, and such talent can't, of course, ever be taught." Howard scholar Rob Roehm considers the use of the phrase "can't ever be taught" to be a variation on the recurrent theme of Howard's lack of skill or training. Moorcock's foreword goes on "[Howard's] greatest hero, Conan the Barbarian, is his best, created from whole cloth, with a nod to Natty Bumppo and Tarzan of the Apes, and most closely representing the kind of person Howard, home-bound, mother-worshipping, suspicious of big cities, would in his dreams most like to be." Roehm counters that none of the assertions made about Howard in that comment are true, although none of them are unique to Moorcock either. In Wizardry & Wild Romance, Moorcock has also written both that Howard "brought a brash, tough element to the epic fantasy that did as much to change the course of the American school away from previous writing and static imagery as Hammett, Chandler and the Black Mask pulp writers were to change the course of the American detective fiction" and that he "was never a commercially successful writer in his lifetime. His brash, hasty, careless style did not lend itself to the classier pulps. Most of his work appeared in the cheapest of them." Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi wrote, in his biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, that "The bulk of Howard's fiction is subliterary hackwork that does not even begin to approach genuine literature" and "The simple fact is, however, that his views are not of any great substance or profundity and that Howard's style is crude, slip-shod, and unwieldy. It is all just pulp—although, perhaps, a somewhat superior grade of pulp than the average." Earnings The following table shows Howard's earnings from writing throughout his career, with appropriate milestones and events noted by each year. During the Depression, Howard earned more than anyone else in Cross