Harold Albert Lamb was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

, screenwriter

Screenwriter

Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...

, short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 writer, and novelist.

Lamb was born in Alpine, New Jersey

Alpine, New Jersey

Alpine is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. It is a suburb of New York City, located northwest of Midtown Manhattan. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough population was 1,849....

. He attended Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, where his interest in the peoples and history of Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

 began. Lamb's tutors at Columbia included Carl Van Doren and
John Erskine

John Erskine (educator)

John Erskine was a U.S. educator and author, born in New York City and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia University ....

.
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

Adventure (magazine)

Adventure magazine was first published in November 1910 as a monthly pulp magazine. Adventure went on become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines...

magazine, his primary fiction outlet for nineteen years. In 1927 he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....

, 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. The success of Lamb's two volume history of the Crusades led to his discovery by Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil Blount DeMille was an American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer in both silent and sound films. He was renowned for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies...

, who employed Lamb as a technical advisor on a related movie, The Crusades, and used him as a screenwriter

Screenwriter

Screenwriters or scriptwriters or scenario writers are people who write/create the short or feature-length screenplays from which mass media such as films, television programs, Comics or video games are based.-Profession:...

 on many other DeMille movies thereafter. Lamb spoke French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

, Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

, and Arabic, and, by his own account, a smattering of Manchu-Tartar.

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

Arthur Sullivant Hoffman

Arthur Sullivant Hoffman was an American magazine editor. Hoffman isbest known for editing the acclaimed pulp magazine Adventurefrom 1912-1927,as well as playing a role in the creation of the American Legion .-Early Life:...

, praised Lamb's writing ability, describing
him as "always the scholar first, the good fictionist second". The majority of Harold Lamb's work for Adventure 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 of his 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 swordsman 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

Khlit the Cossack

Khlit the Cossack is a literary character created by Harold Lamb for Adventure between 1917 and 1926.A wandering Cossack hero, Khlit defies conventional stereotypes: he is not a lover, nor is he youthful or flamboyant...

, 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

Durandal (novel)

Durandal is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb. The complete novel was first published in book form in 1981 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,875 copies of which 400 were boxed and signed by the artists. The novel originally appeared in Adventure in 1926...

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 century. "The Three Palladins" is a story of young Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....

 told mostly from the viewpoint of one of his boyhood comrades, a Chinese prince.

Fiction

• Marching Sands (1920)
• The House of the Falcon (1921)
• The Grand Cham (1922)
• White Falcon (1926)
• Durandal (1931)
• Nur Mahal (1932)
• Kirdy (1933)
• Omar Khayyam (1934)
• A Garden to the Eastward (1947)
• The Curved Saber (1964)
• The Mighty Manslayer (1969)
• The Three Palladins
  The Three Palladins
  The Three Palladins is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb. It was first published in book form in 1977 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,350 copies. The novel originally appeared in the magazine Adventure in 1923....
  
  (1977)

• Durandal
  Durandal (novel)
  Durandal is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb. The complete novel was first published in book form in 1981 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,875 copies of which 400 were boxed and signed by the artists. The novel originally appeared in Adventure in 1926...
  
  (1981)
• The Sea of the Ravens
  The Sea of the Ravens
  The Sea of the Ravens is a novel of historical fiction by Harold Lamb. It was first published in stand-alone book form in 1983 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,925 copies of which 200 were specially bound and signed by the artists. The novel originally appeared in Adventure...
  
  (1983)
• The Skull of Shirzad Mir (2006)
• Wolf of the Steppes (2006)
• Warriors of the Steppes (2006)
• Riders of the Steppes (2007)
• Swords of the Steppes (2007)
• Swords from the West (2009)
• Swords from the Desert (2009)
• Swords from the East (2010)
• Swords from the Sea (2010)

Non-fiction and historical biographies

• Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (1927)
• Tamerlane (1928)
• The Flame of Islam (1930)
• Iron Men and Saints (1930)
• The Crusades (1931)
• The March of the Barbarians (1940)
• Alexander of Macedon: The Journey to World's End (1955)
• The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648 (1948)
• The City and the Tsar: Peter the Great and the Move to the West, 1648-1762 (1948)
• The Earth Shakers (1949)

• Suleiman the Magnificent (1951)
• Theodora and the Emperor: The Drama of Justinian (1952)
• Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man (1954)
• Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde (1954)
• New Found World: How North America Was Discovered and Explored (1955)
• Hannibal: One Man Against Rome (1958)
• Constantinople: Birth of an Empire (1958)
• Chief of the Cossacks(1959)
• Cyrus the Great (1960)
• Babur the Tiger: First of the Great Moguls (1962)

External links

• Official website
• The Harold Lamb Papers, 1915-1960, at the UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections from the Online Archive of California