Questionable Questing

He did. He was really into boxing as a kid and loved bodybuilding, but he suffered from a weak heart all his life and had been taking medication for it for decades. With that putting a stop to any serious plans to go anywhere with it, and is one of the big reasons historians think he really started having problems with being shut in.

He was a a shut in? And that is where the writing comes in?

I mean he had a lot of friends and he was dating this one girl for awhile with the two of them talking about marriage, and while he was never successful enough to be called famous in his own lifetime he was making enough money he probably could've moved out of his parents house if he wanted. But he had always been super close to his mom and she had tuberculosis that she dealt with for decades.

I never knew he was a momma's boy

And interesting historical perspective. He's loved now but in his time he was a minor weird fiction author

Keep in mind this is the 1930's, they didn't have a cure for it. So Howard really helped out as a caretaker for her and his dad for the longest time. But he also really suffered from some pretty heavy depression and had a lot of trouble interacting with people with many historians theorizing he was somewhere on the autism spectrum.

So between those two things he really struggled to launch I guess is the best way to phrase it. So while he was taking care of his parents, in a lot of ways they were taking care of him too. But again it's kind of hard to really pinpoint what happened because he was a very private guy and with how dramatic his death was it kind of overshadows his life and causes everyone to focus on that.

Autism is the mother of art

You know how he died, right?

Nope. Was it sad?

Well his mom's health didn't get better and eventually she fell into a coma that she wouldn't wake up from, dying a day later, and once the nurse told Howard that he walked into his car in the parking lot and killed himself with a pistol he had bought a couple week earlier, around the same time his mom started getting really sick and he decided to settle his will as well.

That's awful. He really loved her but never got a girl for himself?

Again a lot of historians debated why and how it ended up. A lot of his friends were getting married, having kids, and weren't hanging out with him anymore. Including the girl he had been dating for years. With the relationship ending in flames after she hooked up with a close friends of his, since she thought they weren't exclusive.

He had made a lot of attempts to move on from pulp writing and sketchy magazines who had ripped him off a lot, to a more professional publishing studio but he lacked the connections and education to get his foot in. Plus his mom's recent health problems and his own issues made it incredibly hard to write during this time where he came closest to mainstream success.

The girl he'd been dating for years stopped liking him, why?

Because Howard wasn't ready to settle down and start a family with her, which is what she wanted. And after she got really sick after overworking, she had a job as a school teacher, specifically saving money so they could move in together and get him out of his parents house.

When she visited with him after getting out of the hospital he was too busy talking about his mom and her recent health problems to ask if she was alright. Which was her final straw basically, and it's around this time she started banging Howard's friend probably out of revenge or to make him jealous which permanently broke the relationship.

I sleep. It's an interesting topic. Kind of crazy how similar this drama is almost a hundred years later.

I sleep

I feel bad for Howard but it sounds like this man wasn't willing to invest the greater love needed to keep the girl