Robert E. Howard Fans

Robert E. Howard Fans
Category:
Entertainment & Arts - Books & Literature
Description:
Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction.

He created — in the pages of the Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales — Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a character whose pop-culture imprint might be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

With Conan and his other heroes Howard created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a host of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy.
Howard remains a widely read author; his best work has been endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to such other American masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.
[edit] The birth of Sword and Sorcery
As Kane and Costigan stories were rattling off his typewriter, Howard began audacious experiments with the entire concept of the weird tale as defined by practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft, mixing elements of fantasy, horror, mythology, and swordplay into thematic vehicles never before seen. After two years of successive drafts, rewrites, and world creation, he finished "The Shadow Kingdom," which for the first time richly blended elements of horror, history, barbaric adventure, high fantasy, and philosophy into a new style of tale which ultimately became known as Sword and Sorcery. Featuring King Kull, a barbarian precursor to later Howard heroes such as Conan, the tale hit Weird Tales in August 1929 and received much fanfare from readers. Several more Kull stories followed, but enough of them were rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright to convince Howard not to continue the series.

With his own interest in Solomon Kane dwindling and his Kull stories not catching on, Howard applied his new Sword-and-Sorcery template to one of his first loves: the Picts. His story "Kings of the Night" depicted King Kull conjured into pre-Christian Britain to aid the Picts in their struggle against the invading Romans, and introduced readers to Howard's king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn. Howard followed up this tale with the now-classic revenge nightmare "Worms of the Earth" and several other tales, creating horrific adventures tinged with a Cthulhu-esque gloss and notable for their memorable use of metaphor and symbolism.