Skulls in the Stars

Robert Ervin Howard (1906–1936) was an American writer and one of the founding voices of modern fantasy. Born in Peaster, Texas and raised across small oil-boom towns of the Southwest, Howard absorbed the rugged landscapes, frontier violence, and tall-tale bravado that later shaped his fiction. Although he wrote in a wide range of genres—boxing stories, horror, historical adventure, Westerns, and humor—he is best known as the creator of sword-and-sorcery.

Howard’s most iconic character, Conan the Cimmerian, debuted in Weird Tales in 1932 and quickly defined a new type of fantasy hero: barbaric, cunning, physically unstoppable, and driven by instinct rather than destiny. Yet Conan was only one of many: Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn, Red Sonya, and others demonstrated Howard’s versatility in imagining mythic worlds stitched from history, folklore, and personal vision.

His stories combined muscular prose, brooding atmosphere, and a sense of fatalistic energy—qualities that influenced generations of writers from Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber to modern grimdark authors. Though he lived only thirty years, Howard produced hundreds of stories and poems. His life ended tragically in 1936, but his creations endured, finding new life in paperbacks, comics, films, and contemporary fantasy.

Today, Robert E. Howard stands as a titan of pulp imagination, a writer whose work helped define an entire genre and continues to inspire readers nearly a century later.