Conan the Liberator

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Conan the Cimmerian, hero of heroes, was first conceived by Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) of Cross Plains, Texas. Howard was an active pulp writer, and his career coincided with the greatest expansion of the pulp-magazine field. There were scores of such periodicals, all in the same format (about 6.5 X 10 inches) and printed on grayish uncoated paper. Now these magazines have disappeared, save for a few that still carry the old titles under a different format.

During the brief decade of his writing career, Howard wrote fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, sport stories, detective stories, historical fiction, stories of oriental adventure, and verse. But of all his heroes, the one with the widest appeal is Conah the Cimmerian. In the genre of fantasy, the Conan stories have made Howard’s work second only to that of J. R. R. Tolkien in popularity.

Born in Peaster, Texas, Howard lived all his short life in that state except for brief visits to adjacent states and to Mexico. His father was a frontier physician from Arkansas; a man of brusque, domineering manner, he was well regarded as an able country doctor. Robert Howard’s mother, bom in Dallas, Texas, thought herself socially above her husband and, for that matter, above all the folk of Cross Plains, where the family settled in 1919.

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