Robert E. Howard was born in 1906 in Pister, Texas. After graduating from high school, the young Robert tried several jobs, and at a certain point in his life he achieved something almost unthinkable for someone living in a small town in the middle of nowhere: he was able to make a living by selling his writing.
Unfortunately, he did not live to see any of his works published in book form, as all the stories he wrote were intended for publication in the so-called “pulp” magazines of the time.
With his inexhaustible imagination, Robert E. Howard covered the full spectrum of fantasy literature during his brief career: westerns, detective stories, Far East adventures, historical fiction, and, of course, what many consider his own creation and what would later come to be known as “heroic fantasy”—stories set in imaginary worlds where magic replaces technology, and where problems are solved like Gordian knots, through the edge of the sword, physical strength, and bravery.
Sensitive and hopelessly romantic, Howard continued to live an isolated life near his parents in Cross Plains, Texas, with his only real companions being his correspondence with other fantasy writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and, of course, the writing of his own stories.
He took his own life by shooting himself in the head after learning that his long-ill mother had fallen into her final coma. He was only 30 years old, and she died 30 hours later.
Of all Howard’s heroes, none captured the collective imagination of readers more than Conan the Cimmerian, a barbarian from the far north whose adventures sweep across a world entirely of Howard’s own creation—a fictional, pseudo-historical past predating the commonly accepted history of civilization.
All the original Conan stories written by Howard himself are published by our press.
