Conan The Freebooter

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Robert E. Howard (1906-36), the creator of Conan, was born in Peaster, Texas, and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas. During his short life (which ended in suicide at the age of thirty) Howard turned out a large volume of popular fiction: sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, science-fiction, weird, and ghost stories, besides his verse and his many fantasies. Of his several series of heroic fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan stories. Eighteen of these were published in Howard's lifetime; eight others, from mere fragments and outlines to complete manuscripts, have been found among his papers since 1950. The incomplete stories have been completed by my colleague Lin Carter and myself.

In addition, in the early 1950s, I rewrote four unpublished Howard manuscripts of oriental adventure, to convert them into Conan stories by changing names, deleting anachronisms, and introducing a supernatural element. This was not hard, since Howard's heroes were pretty much all cut from the same cloth, and the resulting posthumous collaborations are still about three-quarters or four-fifths Howard. Two of these converted stories appear in the present volume: "Hawks over Shem" (originally called "Hawks over Egypt"), a story laid in eleventh-century Egypt, in the reign of the mad Caliph Hakim; and "The Road of the Eagles," originally placed in the sixteenth-century Turkish Empire.

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