Robert E. Howard

Robert E(rvin) Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, Texas. He first published at the age of nineteen, in 1925, in the magazine Weird Tales, where he would go on to present the majority of his literary work. Large, athletic, and robust, Howard was a semi-professional boxer who seemed to find inspiration in his own reflection for the creation of his various heroes (with one exception in his story "The People of the Monolith," where he hints at a completely different form, an unconventional hero, the mad poet Jeffrey, destroyed by his dives into the surreal and the eerie). His fame, and the hopes for the survival of his work, rest on the 21 stories he wrote featuring Conan the Barbarian, the Cimmerian. Among Robert Howard's books, we can notably include the novel "Almuric," the short story collections "The Dark Man and Others" and "Pigeons from Hell," and the volume of poems "Always Comes Evening." All of Howard's works were published as standalone books posthumously and without his involvement. Robert E(rvin) Howard committed suicide in 1936 at the age of just thirty, upon learning of his mother's sudden death.