On January 22, 1906, Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, the son of a traveling country physician. His mother instilled in him a love of poetry and literature, and he began writing stories when he was nine years old - mostly about Vikings, Arabs, battles and bloodshed. Later he was influenced in his writing by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling and others. When Howard was thirteen, his family moved to Cross Plains, Texas, where he would live for the remainder of his life. At that time he began submitting stories to various adventure fiction magazines, but it would not be until 1924, when he was eighteen, that he would make his first story sale - a short caveman tale called 'Spear and Fang', for which he was paid $16 by a struggling pulp magazine called Weird Tales. Sporadic sales to that magazine and others followed, and in 1929 Weird Tales published a story of Howard's called 'The Shadow Kingdom'.
'The Shadow Kingdom' was an experiment with the entire concept of "weird tale" horror fiction as defined by practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe, A. Merritt and H.P. Lovecraft (with whom Howard corresponded extensively beginning in 1930), mixing elements of fantasy, horror and mythology with historical romance, action and swordplay into thematic vehicles never before seen - a new type of story which ultimately became known as "sword and sorcery". All together Robert E. Howard wrote more than three hundred stories in many different genres - sword and sorcery, westerns, pirate tales and boxing stories among them - and hundreds of poems in his brief lifetime, and he created a number of memorable characters, including Solomon Kane, Kull, and, most enduringly, Conan.
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