Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard (1906–1936) was an American writer of adventure, historical and horror stories, most active in the 1930s. He wrote in English and is regarded as one of the founders of sword and sorcery, a branch of heroic fantasy. His name is still tied to Conan the Barbarian, though his output went well beyond that one character.

He was born in Peaster, Texas, the son of a rural doctor and a mother who took an active part in his education and encouraged his love of poetry and literature. The family moved often across Texas and Oklahoma, through towns that grew and faded with the oil booms, before settling in Cross Plains in 1919. Howard grew up around violence, guns and frontier stories, which gave him a hard-edged view of the world. He took up boxing and bodybuilding as a young man. From childhood he wanted to be a writer and spent years collecting rejections before selling his first story, "Spear and Fang", to the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1924.

Weird Tales became his main outlet. There he created very different heroes: King Kull, the Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane, the Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn, the boxer Steve Costigan, and Conan, who first appeared in 1932 in "The Phoenix on the Sword". His prose mixes physical action, historical texture and a dim view of civilization, which he often portrayed as a fragile order. His worlds reward strength and courage, and gold and beautiful women are frequently the hero's prize. From 1924 he corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft, exchanging ideas about barbarism and decline, and Lovecraft affectionately nicknamed him "Two-Gun Bob".

His personal life was hard. He was very close to his mother, whose marriage to his father had been strained, and he lived most of his life near her. When she fell into an irreversible coma from tuberculosis in June 1936, Howard, then thirty and facing money troubles, shot himself. His mother died the following day. Only after his death were his stories gathered and widely read.

His legacy is large. Howard helped establish the barbarian hero that many readers now associate with fantasy, and his work inspired imitators, comics, films and role-playing games. Alongside J. R. R. Tolkien, he is often cited as one of the most influential figures in modern heroic fantasy.