Harold Lamb

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

Early life

Lamb was born in Alpine, New Jersey. Eliza Rollinson's mother and father, Frederick Lamb, a stained glass glass artist, was born in Eliza Rollinson. His paternal grandfather, J.R., was an artist who began J. R. Lamb Studios, a stained glass manufacturer, is a member of the R. Lamb Studios group.

As a child, he was afraid of impaired hearing, sight, and speech, but he denied attending the Friend's Seminary in New York City but then say that he did not enjoy the experience. In his grandfather's library, he enjoyed reading epic epics. He grew to 6 foot 1 inch (185 cm) tall, with premature grey hair.

He studied at Columbia University in 1914, where his fascination in Asia's people and history began. Carl Van Doren and John Erskine were among his Columbia professors. While there, he competed on both the soccer and tennis teams. He was a member of Delta Psi (St. Anthony Hall) and served on the editorial board of Columbia Monthly, the university's literary journal. Lamb almost flunked out of Columbia because he skipped several classes, instead spending more time at the library enjoying for pleasure. He actually failed a history class. Despite receiving an A.B. degree, he obtained it. He said it was only because he received the H.C. Bunner medal in American literature in 1914 that he owed it to him.

Personal life

He served as a private in the Seventh New York regiment during World War I in May 1917 (K Company). Nonetheless, his unit did not see any activity.

Ruth Lemont Barbour was married on June 14, 1917. For his father's health, they moved to Beverly Hills, California. Cary Lamb's daughter and their son, Frederick Stymetz Lamb, were among their children.

Once he began earning money, he travelled to Europe, India, Persia (Iran), and Russia. He claimed to have travelled 59,000 miles in the Middle East.

During World War II, Lamb served with the Office of Strategic Services in Iran. This was the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. He later served as an informal advisor to the United States Department of State. He served as the president of the American Friends of the Middle East. He spoke French, Latin, Persian, Arabic, and Manchu-Tartar, as well as a smattering of Manchu-Tartar. In 1932, the Persian government gave him a prize for scientific research. In 1933, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco awarded him a silver medal.

He died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, New York, at the age of 69.

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Career

Lamb began writing at an early age. He began writing articles about the mountains of Afghanistan and the Russian steppes, and began writing for pulp magazines. He began writing for Adventure magazine in 1917, his primary fiction outlet for 19 years, with some 58 stories being published. However, his stories were also published in Argosy, All-Story, Asia magazine, Collier's, Short Stories, and The Saturday Evening Post.

He wrote a biography of Genghis Khan in 1927, and after it's success, he moved to non-fiction writing, authoring numerous biographies, and popular history books. He has also contributed to National Geographic and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cecil B. DeMille, who worked Lamb as a technical advisor on a related film, The Crusades, was inspired by Lamb's two-volume history of the Crusades. In addition, he was a screenwriter on several other DeMille films, including The Buccaneer, The Golden Horde, The Plainsman, and Samson and Delilah.

Although Harold Lamb wrote short stories for a number of magazines between 1917 and the early 1960s, his best known and most reprinted fiction is the one he wrote for Adventure between 1917 and 1936. Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, the adventure writer, praised Lamb's writing ability, saying he was "always the scholar first, the good fictionist second." The bulk of Harold Lamb's Adventures were historical fiction, and his stories can be grouped into three broad groups: those starring Cossacks, Crusaders, or Asian/Middle Protagonists.

Lamb's prose was clear and fast-paced, in stark contrast to many other contemporary adventure writers. His books were well researched and rooted in their time, often featuring real historical characters, but they were set in places unfamiliar and exotic to the majority of the western audience reading his books. Although his adventure stories featured tyrannical kings and scheming priests, he avoided stereotypical portrayals of foreign or unfamiliar cultures as evil; many of his heroes were Mongolian, Indian, Russian, or Muslim. The majority of his protagonists were strangers or aliens from society, and only a few were able swordsmen and warriors.

Honor and loyalty to one's comrades-in-arms were more relevant in a Lamb story than cultural identity, although his protagonists were forced to sacrifice their lives to protect the cultures that had inspired them. Those in positions of authority are almost universally depicted as corrupted by their own authority or lust, be it Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, or merchants, merchants are almost always depicted as prioritizing their own happiness over the well-being of their fellow men. In these stories, loyalty, wisdom, and religious piety are all shown more strongly in Lamb's common folk's hands.

Lamb's stories are often depicted as brave, independent, and more shrewd than their male counterparts, although they aren't beholden to the "damsel in distress" trope. However, Lamb's male characters' motives and true loyalty remained elusive, and their unknowable nature is often the point of plot tensions.

Lamb was never a formula plotter, and his stories often revolved around unexpected events resulting from character conflict. The bulk of his Crusader, Asian, and Middle-Eastern stories (as well as Khlit the Cossack's later stories) were written in the latter part of his pulp magazine years and demonstrate a growing command of prose tools, with the more common use of poetic metaphor in his description.

The vast majority of these stories were short stories, novellas, and books of Cossacks wandering the Asian steppes in the late 16th and early 17th century, with just half of them featuring a group of allied characters. Two early books (Kirdy and White Falcon) reprinted the longest of these Cossack tales, and two later books (The Curved Saber and The Mighty Manslayer) reprinted 14 of the short stories; the University of Nebraska Press's four large Steppes volumes published in chronological order; Lamb's Cossack tales are arranged in chronological order.

Khlit, a grey-bearded veteran who lives as often by his wiles as his sword-arm, is one of the Cossack stories; he appears in 18 of them and another. He chooses to wander Asia rather than face coerced "Cossack retirement" in a Russian monastery, embarking on an odyssey that takes him to Mongolia, China, and Afghanistan. He comes to befriend and rely on people he has been raised to loave, and he briefly rises to the head of a Tartar tribe before heading south. Abdul Dost, his greatest aide, helps in bringing up a rebellion in Afghanistan against the Mughal emperor. Khlit resurfaces as a secondary character in later stories, as an older advisor to his adventurous grandson, Kirdy, and other Cossack heroes who were not included in separate stories.

Only a handful of Lamb's Crusader stories are interrelated, unlike Lamb's Cossack stories. Nial O'Gordon, the young knight, is the subject of two novels, while three short stories revolve around Sir Hugh of Taranto, who rediscovered the sword of Roland, Durandal. Durandal, a 1931 book, reprinted Sir Hugh's three books with new linking information. Both Grant Books' Durandal and The Sea of Ravens reprint a single one of these three books.

Although Lamb's Crusaders occasionally battle against their traditional Muslim foes, the overwhelming majority of these tales take place in Asia. All of Lamb's Crusader stories are collected in the 2009 Bison volume Swords from the West, except for Durandal, The Sea of Ravens, and the forthcoming Rusudan, which were all from Donald M. Grant Co.

Lamb wrote or narrated many stories about Muslim, Mongol, or Chinese characters set during the late 16th and early 1800s, as well as the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Young Genghis Khan's "The Three Palladins" is a tale about him as a young boyhood friend, a Chinese prince.

Lamb wrote several tales of naval war in a historical setting. Several of fictions based on John Paul Jones' life in eighteenth-century Russia were among them. He also wrote several books that were almost in the style of dramatic biographies; he did not invent much beyond what was known history.

Lamb wrote several fantasy books about lost worlds. Marching Sands is a poster describing a long lost city of Crusaders in the Gobi Desert. In Kurdistan, a mystery tribe lives in an extinct volcano.

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Awards

• In 1914, he received the H.C. Bunner medal in American literature.
• He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study medieval history at the Vatican Library in Rome for a year, starting on April 1, 1929.