The Little People by Robert E. Howard
“The Little People” is one of several Robert E. Howard stories that was not published during his lifetime. It made its first appearance in the January 1979 issue of Coven 13. However, the manuscript for the story was missing a page, so someone at Coven 13 magazine—probably its editor, Arthur H. Landis—added some text to fill in the gap. This was not mentioned at the time, so readers had no idea the “Little People”, as published in the magazine, contained a section written by an author other than Howard. This edited version of the story was later included in several anthologies. Then, in 2010, the editor and publisher Alfonso D. J. Alfonso republished “The Little People”—in its original, incomplete form—in the anthology Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, highlighting the point where the story breaks due to the missing page.
As with the aforementioned anthology, the text on this page contains only Howard’s words, and indicates the location of the missing page.
“The Little People” appears to have been inspired by the Arthur Machen story, The Shining Pyramid, which is available to read elsewhere on this site. Howard mentions “The Shining Pyramid in the third paragraph of his story. It’s also worth noting “The Little People” is also the title of the final chapter of Machen’s story.
About Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard was an American writer of pulp fiction. Often considered to be the man who began the sword and sorcery subgenre, Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian.
Howard began writing fiction when he was just nine years old. In December 1922, aged 16, his work began paying off when The Tattler (Brownwood High School newspaper) printed two of his stories: “‘Golden Hope Christmas” and “West is West”. Then, in 1924, after years of having his stories rejected by Weird Tales, he made his first sale to the magazine with a caveman story called “Spear and Fang”. This marked the start of Howard’s career as a pulp fiction writer and Weird Tales subsequently became one of his main outlets for weird fiction.
The Little People
By Robert E. Howard
(Online Text)
TEXT REMOVED FROM SITE
Unfortunately, shortly after I added the text to this site, I discovered “The Little People” may not be in the public domain. Copyright law is not always clear cut, and for reasons I do not claim to be able to understand, “The Little People” appears to be copyrighted until 2066, so I have removed it from the site. If I later discover this information is wrong, I will republish the text in its entirety.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.