Welcome to Litsy!

In a meteoric career spanning little more than a decade, Robert E. Howard (1906 - 1936) produced hundreds of vivid and gripping stories for the pulp magazines of his day. He wrote adventure for Top-Notch, historical epics for Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet, westerns for Argosy and Cowboy Stories, boxing yarns for Fight Stories, horror stories for Weird Tales. Yet he is best known for his heroic fantasies. Howard broke with the effete European fantasy tradition to create the hardboiled American school of sword and sorcery. In the pages of Weird Tales he introduced such memorable heroes as the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn, the dour Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane, and King Kull, who ruled a mysterious realm that was old when Atlantis was young. But of them all the most famous by far was the giant barbarian warrior Conan, who came from the bleak northern wilderness of Cimmeria to roam the colorful lands of the lost Hyborian Age. Though created in the 1930s, Howard's brawling barbarian Conan really broke big in the later, more raucous decades of the 60s and 70s. The Conan stories were collected in a series of paperbacks from Lancer Books, and became a publishing phenomenon. Conan subsequently came to be adapted for comics and movies. Howard's other works soon followed Conan back into print. Even the exploits of lesser-known characters such as El Borak and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey were reprinted by specialty publishers like Donald M. Grant --and soon found their way into mass-market paperbacks from Zebra Books, Ace Books and others. Howard won great acclaim for his vivid and colorful prose. However, most commentators on his work failed to notice the rich subtext, themes, and dark undercurrent beneath the surface of his best fiction. In 1987, the first full-length study of Howard's work appeared --the first edition of the present volume, published as part of the Starmont Readers Guide series and long out of print. Now the authors are pleased to present once again their Robert E. Howard study -revised and updated- to help readers new and old better appreciate the work of a literary genius who transformed pulp fiction into poetic heroic sagas.