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Harold Lamb

Harold Albert Lamb (September 1, 1892 – April 9, 1962)[1] was an American historian, screenwriter, short story writer, and
novelist.

Contents
Biography
Fiction
Cossack tales
Crusader tales
Asian and Middle-Eastern tales
Biographical historical novels
Bibliography
Fiction
Realistic historical novels
Non-fiction and historical biographies
References
External links

Biography
Lamb was born in Alpine, New Jersey[2] to Eliza Rollinson and Frederick Lamb.[3] He was the nephew of the architect Charles
Rollinson Lamb. He attended Columbia University, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia began. Lamb's tutors at
Columbia included Carl Van Doren and John Erskine.[4] He later got a Guggenheim Fellowship for twelve months, starting on April
1, 1929.[5]

Lamb built a career with his writing from an early age. He got his start in the pulp magazines, quickly moving to the prestigious
Adventure magazine, his primary fiction outlet for nineteen years. In 1927 he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan, and following on
its success turned more and more to the writing of non-fiction, penning numerous biographies and popular history books until his
death in 1962 in Rochester, N.Y. 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, and used him as a screenwriter on many other DeMille
movies thereafter. Lamb spoke French, Latin, Persian, and Arabic, and, by his own account, a smattering of Manchu-T
artar.

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 magazine 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".[4] The majority of Harold Lamb's work forAdventure was historical fiction, and can be thematically divided into three broad
categories of tales:

Stories featuring Cossacks


Stories featuring Crusaders
Stories with Asian or Middle-Eastern Protagonists
Lamb's prose was direct and fast-paced, in stark contrast to that of many other contemporary adventure writers. His 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. 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 own power or consumed with greed, be they Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, and
merchants are almost always shown as placing their own 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 female characters occasionally played the familiar role of damsel in distress in these stories, Lamb more typically depicted his
women 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; the more frequent use, for example, of
poetic metaphor in his description.

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
fourteen of the short stories; the four large Steppes volumes published by The University of Nebraska Press present all of Lamb's
Cossack tales in their chronological order.

The most famous of these Cossack characters is Khlit, a greybearded veteran who survives as often by his wiles as his swordarm; he
is a featured character in eighteen of the Cossack adventures and appears in a nineteenth. 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 he wanders further south. His greatest friend proves to be the swashbuckling Muslim swordsman, Abdul Dost, whom he aids
in raising a rebellion against the Moghul emperor in Afghanistan. In later stories Khlit returns as a secondary character, an aged
advisor to both 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 inter-related. 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 forthcoming 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. "The Three Palladins" is a story of young
Genghis Khan, told mostly from the viewpoint of one
of his boyhood comrades, a Chinese prince.

Biographical historical novels


Lamb wrote several novels which were almost in the nature of dramatized biographies. Very little was invented beyond known
history.

Bibliography

Fiction
Marching Sands (1920) Durandal (1981)
The House of the Falcon (1921) The Sea of the Ravens (1983)
The Grand Cham (1922) The Skull of Shirzad Mir (2006)
White Falcon (1926) Wolf of the Steppes (2006)
Durandal (1931) Warriors of the Steppes (2006)
Nur Mahal (1932) Riders of the Steppes (2007)
Kirdy (1933) Swords of the Steppes (2007)
Omar Khayyam (1934) Swords from the West (2009)
A Garden to the Eastward (1947) Swords from the Desert (2009)
The Curved Saber (1964) Swords from the East (2010)
The Mighty Manslayer (1969) Swords from the Sea (2010)
The Three Palladins (1977)

Realistic historical novels


Suleiman the Magnificent(1951)
Theodora and the Emperor: The Drama of Justinian(1952)

Non-fiction and historical biographies


Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (1927) Charlemagne: The Legend and the
Tamerlane (1928) Man (1954)
The Flame of Islam (1930) Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde
Iron Men and Saints (1930) (1954)
New Found World: How North America
The Crusades (1931)
Was Discovered and Explored (1955)
The March of the Barbarians (1940)
Constantinople: Birth of an Empire
Alexander of Macedon: The Journey to World's (1957)
End (1946)
Hannibal: One Man Against Rome
The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the (1958)
Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648 (1948)
Chief of the Cossacks (1959)
The City and the Tsar: Peter the Great and the
Cyrus the Great (1960)
Move to the West, 1648-1762 (1948)
The Earth Shakers (1949)
Babur the Tiger: First of the Great
Moguls (1962)

References
1. "Finding Aid for the Harold Lamb Papers, 1915-1960"(http://www.oac.cdlib.org/data/13030/sp/tf929008sp/files/tf929
008sp.pdf) (UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections). Online Archive of California. c. 1999. Retrieved
July 3, 2010.
2. Miller, John J. (August 26, 2009)."Shepherding a Lamb's Lost Legacy"(https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405
2970204409904574350983611946784). The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 4, 2010.
3. "Harold Lamb: Adventure short story writer
, Novelist, Historian - PulpFlakes Blogspot - 25 May 2012"(http://pulpflake
s.blogspot.com/2012/05/harold-lamb-adventure-short-story .html). Retrieved 26 March 2015.
4. Twentieth 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).
5. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130921055326/http://www .gf.org/fellows/8338-harold-albert-lamb).
Archived from the original (http://www.gf.org/fellows/8338-harold-albert-lamb) on 2013-09-21. Retrieved 2013-09-20.
. Guggenheim Fellowship.

External links
Works written by or aboutHarold Albert Lamb at Wikisource
Works by Harold Lamb at Faded Page (Canada)
Official website
The Harold Lamb Papers, 1915-1960, at the UCLA Library
, Department of Special Collectionsfrom the Online
Archive of California

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