This 860-page collection contains all of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories published, during his lifetime, contextualized with biographical details of their author.
Excerpt from Introduction:
When the first Conan of Cimmeria story appeared in the pages of Weird Tales magazine in December 1932, nothing quite like it had ever before, appeared in print.
Author Robert E. Howard had been, writing stories broadly similar to it for half a decade; but it was with Conan, and the Hyborian Age story world, in which he was placed, that Howard finally fully doped out the sub-genre that would become known as "sword and sorcery," of which Howard is today considered the founding father.
Conan's origins date back to an experiment in 1926 titled "The Shadow Kingdom," featuring the character Kull, exile of Atlantis. The idea, Howard's great innovation was, at its core, historical fiction set in a pre-historical period. That pre-historical period, being, of course, lost in the mists of time, could contain anything Howard might like to include: evil races of sentient snake-things, sorcerers, undead creatures, demons walking upon the earth, anything.
In other words, Howard was creating a secular mythology. And as with any mythology, secular or no, there would be a hero, a Ulysses or a Theseus, an exceptional man of legend striding through that myth-world, sword in hand, righting wrongs and slaying supernatural monsters and, along the way, providing metaphorical insight onto his world and ours.
At the same time, he was finding success with another historical-fiction-fusion innovation: The grim, savage English Puritan Solomon Kane. Kane's world was the skull-strewn chaos of Europe and north Africa, during the Thirty Years War, in the early 1600s. Little enough is known about specific events, during that dark time that it was possible to take historical liberties with it as a story world, so that it could accommodate dark magic, walking skeletons, vampires, magic staffs, and, of course, N'Longa the witch-doctor.
