Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) is most widely known today as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, more popularly referred to as Conan the Barbarian. However, he also wrote across a wide array of genres for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, including westerns, sports stories (boxing), adventures, supernatural horror, and even humor. Howard also created many other popular characters such as King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Steve Costigan, and Breckenridge Elkins. More importantly, he created two specific subgenres of fiction: sword and sorcery (sometimes referred to as heroic fantasy) and weird westerns. Born and raised in Texas, Robert E. Howard began his writing career after his family settled in the small Central Texas town of Cross Plains. His first professional sale came from the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1925, and over the next eleven years he wrote hundreds of stories and an equal number of poems. With this prolific body of stories, he was among the most lauded
