Although tales of swordsmen and sorcerers had certainly preceded them, it would be the stories of Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria that would popularize the genre, paving the way for characters such as C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, and Glen Cook’s Black Company.
Debuting in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” Conan seemed to spring full-bodied to the mind of Robert E. Howard:
The man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part, and immediately a stream of stories flowed … almost without effort … I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing.
Hot on the heels of that first story, “The Scarlet Citadel” appeared in the January 1933 issue of “The Unique Magazine.” The classic “The Tower of the Elephant” ran two months later in the March number. Fourteen more tales of the Cimmerian would appear in Weird Tales, including gems such as “Rogues in the House,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” “Beyond the Black River,” and “Red Nails,” which closed out the series in 1936.
Although Howard died by suicide in 1936, his most famous creation was later revived in hardcover collections published by Arkham House and Gnome Press. But it was the mid-sixties Lancer paperbacks, with their striking Frank Frazetta covers, that enthralled baby-boom readers, led to Conan movies and comic books, and gave rise to a new generation of Howard scholars who have worked tirelessly to keep all their favorite author’s works in print.
Conan was not featured on the cover of the December 1932 Weird Tales. Instead, the front cover painting by J. Allen St. John illustrated Otis Adelbert Kline’s “Buccaneers of Venus.”
