Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) spent his early life moving from one small Texas town to another, the son of a travelling country physician. The family eventually settled in Cross Plains, where domestic life was overshadowed by his parents’ unhappy marriage and by the increasing ill-health of his mother, who suffered for many years from tuberculosis.

The young Howard read voraciously, while his father’s occupation exposed him to the gritty and sometimes violent precariousness of Texan life in the age of cow towns and oil booms. He soon began writing his own adventure fiction: contemporary tales of outlaws and boxers, as well as blood-drenched historical fantasies of Vikings, Picts, and other ancient warriors.

He began submitting work to the burgeoning pulp magazine market while still a teenager, selling his first story to Weird Tales in 1924, and later corresponding with authors including H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. His iconic sword-and-sorcery hero Conan debuted in the same magazine in 1932.

The Conan stories, alongside Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, helped shape the central traditions of modern fantasy, with Howard’s work especially influential on role-playing games. Howard never lived to see the full recognition of his creation: in 1936, after being told that his dying mother would not regain consciousness, he shot himself and died aged thirty. His family home in Cross Plains is now the Robert E. Howard Museum, celebrating his life and work.

Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.