Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was an American writer of pulp fiction and the creator of Conan the Barbarian. The son of a country doctor, he spent nearly his whole life in the small town of Cross Plains, Texas, and sold his first story to Weird Tales at eighteen. In a career of little more than a decade he wrote hundreds of stories of adventure, boxing, horror and the sword-and-sorcery genre he invented, with heroes including Kull, Solomon Kane and above all Conan, whose tales, among them Beyond the Black River and Red Nails, appeared from 1932. He shot himself at thirty on learning that his mother would not regain consciousness.