Humor

In his humorous Westerns, Howard shows a mastery of regional dialect and comedic styles (from sly understatement to knockabout farce) that Mark Twain would have saluted.

Breckinridge Elkins

Imagine a backwoodsman who combines L’il Abner, Davy Crockett, and John Wayne in one six-foot-six, coonskin-capped, stubbornly independent package, and you have an image of Breck Elkins, the Gent from Bear Creek, Nevada. The first-person protagonist of Howard’s most popular humorous Westerns, Breck doesn’t need to hunt for trouble; it finds him on its own, usually prompted by an innocent errand. A mission to retrieve an uncle’s stolen gold, to restore a jilted cousin’s honor, or to impress Breck’s tempestuous sweetheart Glory McGraw typically results in a dust-up that makes the O.K. Corral shoot-out look like a church social. “Howard’s material came from the land and the people of his childhood and his manhood,” said fellow pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price. “His characters … were real. They spoke the speech and moved in accord with the spirit of the country.” Two of Howard’s other Western heroes – Buckner J. Grimes of Knife River, Texas, and Pike Bearfield of Wolf Mountain, Texas – share Breck’s tangy Lone Star vernacular and knack for mayhem. Hilarious, original and brilliant.