Harold Albert Lamb (September 1, 1892 – April 9, 1962) was an American writer, novelist, historian, and screenwriter.[1][2] In both his fiction and nonfiction work, Lamb gravitated toward subjects related to Asia and the Middle East.
Lamb was an advocate of inclusive literature and history, saying to The New York Times in 1953, "It all came out as an intense irritation over the fact that all history seemed to draw a north-south line across Europe, through Berlin and Venice, say. Everything was supposed to have happened west of that line, nothing to the East. Ridiculous of course."[3]
Early life
Lamb was born in Alpine, New Jersey.[4][5] His mother was Eliza Rollinson, and his father was Frederick Lamb, a mural painter who designed stained glass.[2] His paternal grandfather was an artist who started J. & R. Lamb Studios, a company that made stained glass.[4][2][6]
He was shy with impaired hearing, sight, and speech as a child,[2] attending the Friend’s Seminary in New York City, but declaring that he had not enjoyed the experience.[2] He preferred reading historical epics in his grandfather's library.[2] He grew to 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) tall, with premature grey hair.[2]
In 1914, he attended Columbia University, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia began. His professors at Columbia included Carl Van Doren and John Erskine.[7][2] While there, he played on the soccer and tennis teams.[2] He joined the literary fraternity of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall), and was on the editorial board of Columbia Monthly, the university's literary magazine.[2] However, Lamb almost flunked out of Columbia because he skipped many classes, spending much time instead reading for pleasure at the library. He failed a history class.[2] Although he graduated with an A.B. in 1916, he claimed it was only because he received Columbia University's H.C. Bunner medal in American literature in 1914.[2][5][8]
In 1927 he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan, and following its success turned more and more to the writing of non-fiction, penning numerous biographies and popular history books.[4] He also wrote articles for National Geographic and the San Francisco Chronicle.[10]
The success of Lamb's two-volume history of the Crusades led to his discovery by Cecil B. DeMille, who employed Lamb as a technical advisor on a related movie, The Crusades.[4] He was also a screenwriter on many other DeMille movies, including The Buccaneer, The Golden Horde, The Plainsman and Samson and Delilah.[2]
Fiction
Although Harold Lamb wrote short stories for a variety of magazines between 1917 and the early 1960s and wrote several novels, his best-known and most reprinted fiction is that which he wrote for Adventure between 1917 and 1936. The editor of Adventure, Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, praised Lamb's writing ability, describing him as "always the scholar first, the good fictionist second".[7] The majority of Harold Lamb's work for Adventure was historical fiction, and his stories can be thematically divided into three categories — those featuring Cossacks, Crusaders, or Asian/Middle-Eastern Protagonists.
Lamb's stories were well-researched and rooted in their time, often featuring real historical characters, but set in places unfamiliar and exotic to most of the western audience reading his fiction. While his adventure stories had familiar tropes such as tyrannical rulers and scheming priests, he avoided the simplistic depiction of foreign or unfamiliar cultures as evil; many of his heroes were Mongolian, Indian, Russian, or Muslim.[9] Most of his protagonists were outsiders or outcasts apart from civilization, and all but a very few were skilled swordsmen and warriors.
In a Lamb story, honor and loyalty to one's comrades-in-arms were more important than cultural identity, although often his protagonists ended up risking their lives to protect the cultures that had spurned them. Those holding positions of authority are almost universally depicted as being corrupted by their power or consumed with greed, be they Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, and merchants are almost always shown as placing their desire for coin above the well-being of their fellow men. Loyalty, wisdom, and religious piety is shown again and again in these stories to lie more securely in the hands of Lamb's common folk.
While his stories are not bereft of the "damsel in distress" trope, Lamb typically depicted his female characters as courageous, independent, and more shrewd than their male counterparts. Their motives and true loyalties, though, remained mysterious to Lamb's male characters, and their unknowable nature is frequently the source of plot tension.
Lamb was never a formula plotter, and his stories often turned upon surprising developments arising from character conflict. The bulk of his Crusader, Asian, and Middle-Eastern stories (as well as the latter stories of Khlit the Cossack) were written in the latter portion of his pulp magazine years, and demonstrate a growing command of prose tools, with the more frequent use, for example, of poetic metaphor in his description.[9]
Cossack tales
By far the largest number of these tales were short stories, novellas, and novels of Cossacks wandering the Asian steppes during the late 16th and early 17th century, all but a half-dozen featuring a set of allied characters. Two early books (Kirdy and White Falcon) reprinted the longest of these Cossack adventures, and two later books (The Curved Saber and The Mighty Manslayer) reprinted 14 of the short stories; the four large Steppes volumes published by the University of Nebraska Press present all of Lamb's Cossack tales in chronological order.
The most famous of these Cossack characters is Khlit, a grey-bearded veteran who survives as often by his wiles as his sword arm; he is a featured character in 18 of the Cossack adventures and appears in another. He chooses to wander Asia rather than face forced "Cossack retirement" in a Russian monastery and launches into an odyssey that takes him to Mongolia, China, and Afghanistan. He comes to befriend and rely upon folk he has been raised to despise and briefly rises to leadership of a Tartar tribe before wandering further south. His greatest friend proves to be the swashbuckling swordsman, Abdul Dost, whom he aids in raising a rebellion against the Mughal emperor in Afghanistan. In later stories, Khlit returns as a secondary character, an aged advisor to his adventurous grandson, Kirdy, and other Cossack heroes featured in separate stories.
Crusader tales
Unlike Lamb's Cossack stories, only a handful of his Crusader stories are interrelated. Two novelettes feature the young knight, Nial O'Gordon, and three short novels are centered around Sir Hugh of Taranto, who rediscovers the sword of Roland, Durandal. Durandal, published in 1931, reprinted all three novels of Sir Hugh with new linking material. Grant Books' Durandal and The Sea of Ravens each reprint a single of these three novels.
While Lamb's Crusaders sometimes battle against their traditional Muslim foes, the majority of these tales feature forays into deeper Asia. All of Lamb's Crusader stories have been collected in the 2009 Bison volume Swords from the West, except for Durandal, The Sea of Ravens and the announced Rusudan, all from Donald M. Grant Co. Related stories with occasional Crusaders are collected in Swords from the Desert (Bison, 2009).
Asian and Middle-Eastern tales
Lamb also wrote a variety of stories featuring or narrated by Muslim, Mongol, or Chinese protagonists, set for the most part during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.[9] "The Three Paladins" is a story of young Genghis Khan, told mostly from the viewpoint of one of his boyhood comrades, a Chinese prince.
Other
Lamb produced several stories of naval warfare with a historical setting. These included several fictions revolving around John Paul Jones in eighteenth-century Russia.[11] He also wrote several novels which were almost like dramatized biographies; he did not invent much beyond known history.
Lamb produced several fantasy novels featuring lost worlds. These included Marching Sands, about a lost city of Crusaders in the Gobi Desert.[12][13]A Garden to the Eastward features a hidden tribe living in an extinct volcano in Kurdistan.[13]
Awards
In 1914, Lamb received the H.C. Bunner medal in American literature.[5]
Robert E. Howard described Lamb as one of his "favorite writers".[14]Cecelia Holland has described Lamb as "a master of pace [who] had a gift also for the quick glimpse of a landscape that throws everything into perspective", and has praised Lamb's plotting and action writing.[15]
During World War I in May 1917, he served as a private in the Seventh New York regiment (K Company).[2] However, his unit did not see any action.[2]
He married Ruth Lemont Barbour (d. 1986) on June 14, 1917.[2][6] They moved to Beverly Hills, California for his father's health.[2][6] Their children include a daughter, Cary Lamb (d. 1985), and a son, Frederick Stymetz Lamb.[6]
Once he began earning money, he traveled to Europe, India, Persia (Iran), and Russia.[2] He claimed to have traveled 59,000 miles in the Middle East.[6]
^ abTwentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary of modern literature, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft; (Third Edition). New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950 (pp. 784-5).
^Columbia College (Columbia University). Office of Alumni Affairs and Development; Columbia College (Columbia University) (1956). Columbia College today. Columbia University Libraries. New York, N.Y. : Columbia College, Office of Alumni Affairs and Development.
^ abcdHulse, Ed. The Blood n' Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction Middletown, DE : Muraina Press, 2018. ISBN9781726443463 (p.53)
^Charles Grayson, Half-a-hundred: tales by great American writers. Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company, 1945 (p.248)
^David Pringle, The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy: the definitive illustrated guide. London, Carlton. 1998 ISBN9781858683737 (p.30).
^ abRobert Reginald, Douglas Menville, Mary A. Burgess, Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature A Checklist, 1700-1974: with Contemporary Science Fiction Authors I. Wildside Press, 2010 ISBN9780941028769 (pp. 303-4)
^Rusty Burke, "A Short Biography of Robert E. Howard", in The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 2004, ISBN9780345461506 (p.395)
^"I first encountered Lamb’s work in grade school; it has had a profound effect on me, as his was the first work I’d read that made history more than the dry recitation of dates." Scott Oden in "Writing: Historical Fantasy and the Book Deal". Black Gate, December 6th, 2010. Retrieved May 14th, 2019.
^"Influenced by the work of Harold Lamb in particular, Howard was fascinated with the variety of exotic locations and situations suggested by history..." Don D'Ammassa, "Howard's Oriental Stories" in Darrell Schweitzer, The Robert E. Howard Reader. Wildside Press LLC, 2010. ISBN9781434411655 (p.114).
^"Lamb's fiction, almost forgotten now, was an enormous influence over later writers of popular fiction such as Robert E. Howard, Norvell Page, and Harry Harrison, to name just three." James Enge, "Introduction", in Harold Lamb, Swords from the east. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. ISBN9780803219496 (p. xi)
^"Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson (1890-1968) is best remembered as the founder of DC Comics. He was also a prominent writer of adventure fiction for pulp magazines. One series he had featured Alan de Beaufort, a Crusader who rode with Genghis Khan’s Mongols, just like Harold Lamb’s Hugh of Taranto."The Pulp Swordsmen: Alan de Beaufort" by Morgan Holmes, at REHupa Website, Archived from the original on 2010-05-30. Retrieved 2019-02-28.
^" I have kept many books in front of me all through the arduous work which has gone into the writing of this story: Three volumes by Harold Lamb, Genghis Khan, The March of the Barbarians, The Crusades," Thomas B. Costain, "Introduction" to The Black Rose, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1945. (pp. ix-x).
^"ASM: What authors have influenced you the most? BB:...More contemporary writers? Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Harold Lamb, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling... It’s a long list." Troughton, R.K. "Interview with Science Fiction Legend Ben Bova". Amazing Stories, July 23, 2013. Retrieved February 4, 2021.
^Sutton, Matthew Avery (2019). Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States during the Second World War. New York: Hachette. p. 174. ISBN9780465052660.
