Howard, Robert E.: The Haunter of the Ring. V1. 18 Nov 2008
 

Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an
American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure,
boxing, western, and detective fiction.

He created — in the pages of the Depression-era pulp magazine
Weird Tales — Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian,
a character whose pop-culture imprint might be compared to
such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula,
Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

With Conan and his other heroes Howard 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 rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and
Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of
High Fantasy.

Howard remains a highly read author, with his best work
endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to other American
masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral, such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.

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