Robert E. Howard was an American pulp writer best remembered as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and one of the founding figures of sword-and-sorcery fiction. Born in Texas in 1906, Howard grew up fascinated by history, frontier violence, boxing, ancient civilizations, and the hard lives of people shaped by danger and struggle. He began publishing in pulp magazines while still young, and Weird Tales became the central home for much of his most important work.Howard's fiction ranges across fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing stories, westerns, detective tales, and weird menace. His characters include Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Sailor Steve Costigan, and many others, but his work is unified by its driving energy, vivid physical action, dark atmosphere, and powerful sense of doomed civilizations. He wrote with unusual speed and intensity, producing a large body of work before his death in 1936 at the age of thirty.Although Howard's life was short, his influence has been enormous. Conan became one of the most recognizable figures in fantasy, and Howard's fusion of myth, violence, horror, adventure, and heroic fatalism helped shape modern fantasy, gaming, comics, film, and pulp revival publishing. His best stories remain alive because they move with raw force: fierce, brooding, violent, and charged with the feeling that civilization is always temporary and the wilderness is never far away.