Robert E. Howard

Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was a classic American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. He is most famous for having created — in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales — the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose instantly recognizable pop-culture imprint is rivalled by only a handful of other literary characters, such as Tarzan of the Apes, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond. Between Conan and his other heroes Howard single-handedly created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a wide swath of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivalled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.