Readify
Download App

Conan the Barbarian

Overview

“Conan the Barbarian” is commonly used for Robert E. Howard’s Conan story cycle and for the collections assembled from those stories, rather than for one continuous novel by Howard. Conan first appeared in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” published in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales. The cycle belongs to pulp fantasy and is one of the foundational works of sword-and-sorcery fiction. Its setting is the Hyborian Age, an imagined prehistoric world of rival kingdoms, remote wildernesses, ancient ruins, pirate seas, hidden temples, and forgotten powers. Howard gives this world the scale of legendary history while filling it with the immediacy of a fast-moving adventure story.

Conan is a Cimmerian from the north: physically formidable, observant, quick to act, and shaped by a life of danger. The stories do not present him as a king from the beginning. He moves through the world as a thief, warrior, mercenary, pirate, captain, slave, and gladiator before eventually becoming king of Aquilonia. The plot of the cycle is therefore episodic rather than linear. In one adventure Conan may enter a haunted ruin or confront an ancient creature; in another he may be caught in a court conspiracy, a religious scheme, a war, or a struggle for survival in an unfamiliar land. Across these separate narratives, his wandering life gradually becomes a broad biography of a man who learns to navigate both the wilderness and the complicated machinery of power.

Themes and Style

The central tension is between civilization and barbarism, though Howard treats neither term as a simple moral category. Palaces, laws, dynasties, and cultivated cities often conceal corruption, decadence, treachery, and tyranny. Conan’s “barbarism” is not stupidity. His instincts, physical courage, practical intelligence, and resistance to imposed authority allow him to see through systems that claim to be orderly. At the same time, the wilderness is not romanticized as safe or innocent. It is violent and unforgiving, and survival often depends on strength, alertness, and the ability to make immediate decisions.

Freedom is equally important. Conan values self-direction above respectability, and he refuses to accept that rank, custom, or religious authority automatically deserves obedience. Gold, power, and even a crown can change his circumstances without fully changing his nature. The stories also explore survival, desire, loyalty, ambition, and the fragile boundary between human courage and destructive violence. Howard’s prose is vivid and propulsive, relying on abrupt reversals, physical movement, threatening landscapes, and intense sensory detail. Sorcery is rarely presented as a benign wonder: it is ancient, corrupting, and difficult for ordinary people to understand. Ruins, monsters, and forgotten civilizations give the adventures a sense that human kingdoms are temporary intrusions upon a much older and stranger world.

Background and Influence

Howard developed Conan while writing for the American pulp-magazine market, especially Weird Tales. The pulps were produced cheaply and circulated in large numbers, favoring exciting, horrific, unusual, and highly dramatic fiction. Their format rewarded an author who could establish danger immediately and sustain momentum through action. Howard drew on several popular traditions, including frontier adventure, historical romance, horror, and tales of lost civilizations, but combined them into a distinctive imaginary history rather than placing them in a conventional historical period.

The result had a lasting effect on fantasy. Conan helped define the sword-and-sorcery pattern of the wandering fighter, the ancient evil, the decadent kingdom, the hostile wilderness, the dangerous wizard, and the hero who survives by personal ability rather than inherited status. Later fantasy novels, comics, illustrations, role-playing games, films, and video games repeatedly adapted or reworked these elements. The 1982 film Conan the Barbarian made the character even more widely known, although its story and tone are not identical to Howard’s fiction. In literary history, the Conan cycle remains Howard’s most enduring creation and a major bridge between pulp storytelling and modern fantasy culture.

About the Author

Author of Conan the Barbarian

Early Life and Education

Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, the only child of Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane Ervin Howard. He spent most of his life in central Texas, particularly in and around Cross Plains. The region’s rural culture, frontier memories, oil-boom changes, and atmosphere of physical hardship became important elements in his imagination. Howard’s fiction was shaped less by the literary institutions of the East than by the expansive, rough, and often violent environment he knew firsthand.

When he was twelve, Howard lived for a year in New Orleans, Louisiana, while his father undertook additional medical study. He later returned to Texas. Because Cross Plains did not offer the final year of high school, Howard and his mother stayed in a boarding house in Brownwood so that he could complete his education. He graduated from Brownwood High School in 1923. Afterward he returned to Cross Plains and held a variety of temporary jobs. In 1925 he went back to Brownwood to study business at Howard Payne College. He received a one-year business certificate in 1927, but he did not build a career in business. During his college years he wrote for the school newspaper, developing the discipline and confidence that supported his professional fiction writing.

Writing Career

Howard began submitting stories to pulp magazines at an early age. He wrote short stories, poetry, fiction of novel length, and extensive correspondence, sometimes using pen names. The pulp market, with its inexpensive mass circulation and appetite for action, horror, adventure, and strange settings, provided a natural outlet for his energetic style. His work ranged across fantasy, horror, westerns, historical adventure, and other popular forms.

Among his important early creations were Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn. The Solomon Kane stories emerged in the late 1920s, while “The Shadow Kingdom,” a Kull story, appeared in 1929. These works already show Howard’s recurring interests in lost civilizations, supernatural terror, the instability of kingdoms, and the conflict between human vitality and decaying institutions. In 1932 he created Conan, who first appeared in “The Phoenix on the Sword” in the December issue of Weird Tales. Conan became Howard’s best-known creation, moving through the roles of thief, warrior, mercenary, pirate, and captain before eventually becoming king of Aquilonia. Howard also created El Borak and wrote works including “The Shadow of the Vulture,” demonstrating a range considerably broader than the Conan cycle alone.

Death and Reputation

Howard’s professional career was brief but remarkably productive. His fiction is distinguished by rapid pacing, powerful visual description, direct physical action, and a continuing interest in the tensions between civilization, freedom, power, and survival. He died in Cross Plains, Texas, on June 11, 1936, at the age of thirty; his death is widely recorded as suicide.

Although Howard was already a successful pulp writer during his lifetime, his influence expanded substantially after his death. He is now regarded as a major American fantasy writer and one of the principal founders of sword-and-sorcery fiction. Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn have remained in print and have been adapted through comics, illustration, film, games, and role-playing culture. Conan in particular became one of fantasy’s most recognizable heroic figures. Howard’s lasting reputation rests not only on that character’s iconic power, but also on the distinctive way he joined the immediacy of pulp adventure to horror, frontier storytelling, and a sustained meditation on the rise and collapse of civilizations.

StoryFlow

The Vengeance Quest from "Conan the Barbarian". Conan's lifelong pursuit of the raiders who destroyed his village and of Thulsa Doom, from the boy's first sight of the black-serpent emblem to the final…

The Vengeance Quest

Conan's lifelong pursuit of the raiders who destroyed his village and of Thulsa Doom, from the boy's first sight of the black-serpent emblem to the final beheading.

The King's Commission from "Conan the Barbarian". Osric's plea to three thieves to redeem his daughter from the serpent cult, and the winding road that turns a royal mission into a revolution.

The King's Commission

Osric's plea to three thieves to redeem his daughter from the serpent cult, and the winding road that turns a royal mission into a revolution.

From Slave to Slayer from "Conan the Barbarian". The physical and spiritual transformation of Conan from a captive child into a free warrior who chooses his own horizon.

From Slave to Slayer

The physical and spiritual transformation of Conan from a captive child into a free warrior who chooses his own horizon.