I've mentioned this before, but L. Sprague de Camp comes across as an insufferable know-it-all and gamma "smart boy." This is from the Wikipedia article on one of his series, the Pusadian Series:
Just as de Camp attempted to do for the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs with his "Krishna" stories, the Pusadian stories represent both a tribute to Howard's prehistoric "Hyborian Age" and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing his model's concept logically, without what he regarded as Howard's anthropological and geological absurdities. Unlike Howard, de Camp brought a thorough knowledge of ancient history and geography to his project, along with a wealth of research on prior literary treatments of speculative prehistoric civilizations, as reflected in his definitive study Lost Continents (1954).
This is complete BS. Howard was extremely well-read and had as thorough a knowledge of ancient history and geography as de Camp was likely to have had. Before he—essentially—invented sword & sorcery, Howard wrote historical swashbuckling romance. Basically sword & sorcery in the real world—minus most of the sorcery. The reason he enjoyed sword & sorcery was because he was meticulous about making sure that he made no historical or geographical errors in his historical fiction, and it was both time consuming and kind of exhausting. Sword & sorcery meant he could handwave it and not have to do as much research and backchecking of details. But he was very serious about it, because he felt legitimately embarrassed to be found out in an error by a reader. Plus, he enjoyed ancient history and geography and mythology in its own right, and was quite well-read. He had both breadth and depth of historical and geographical knowledge that I simply don't believe that de Camp exceeded.
Besides, we're talking about stories about Atlantis here. It's pretty rich for de Camp to claim that his Atlantis stories are better than Howards' because he was convinced that he knew more about history and geography than Howard had twenty years earlier, without acknowledging that there's no reason to believe that there was a historical or geographic reality for Atlantis.
This is just pure and kind of obvious in retrospect gamma posturing, of the kind that we see all too much of on the internet. Attempting to position himself as some kind of "smarter than thou" know-it-all who's talents and knowledge aren't nearly as much as he personally esteems them as. De Camp can't complain about his career; he seems to have done well enough, but always been perpetually insecure and trying to push himself on everyone as some kind of expert. It's no accident that people still talk about Howard in glowing words nearly a hundred years after his death, while de Camp's works are largely forgotten only twenty five or so years after his.
Gamma confirmed from even just this brief anecdote of his youth from his own Wikipedia page:
De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School was an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story Judgment Day.
Although to be fair to de Camp; in two ways, at least, he was significantly more successful than Howard. He lived to be 92, died of old age, was married and had two children, and seems to have been happily married at that. Howard, of course, grew up with a bitter, sickly mother who clung to him, embittered him against his father, and was probably subject to mental health problems of is own; either because of his mother's smothering influence or just because people sometimes inherit those problems. Never married, and he committed suicide when his mother slipped into a coma from which she never awoke, he seems to have been a happy, healthy enough guy; athletic and charming, but clearly he had problems that de Camp did not.
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