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to separate him from his fixation on his mother. 14
    These reported impressions suggest that the determinants of Howard's behavior were deeper and older than his grief over his mother's impending death and that her passing became the occasion for, not the cause of, his suicide.
    Howard had some self-knowledge. When he was in an expansive mood, he tended to identify with his grandfathers, of whom he was understandably proud. He saw himself as a pioneer in his profession, just as his grandfathers had been pioneers of the West. "I was the first," he said, "to light the torch of literature in this part of the country, however small, frail, and easily extinguished that flame may be." 15
    His was a lonely task. Howard became a writer in spite of his environment, and he paid the price in isolation. Howard wrote: . . it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign to the people among which one's lot is cast." 16 So alien, indeed, was his profession that few people in Cross Plains ever tried to understand the lone young man who lived among them. They chose, rather, to ignore him or to dismiss him as merely eccentric.
    And who can blame the good people of Cross Plains for their lack of understanding? Howard himself did not fully realize the extent of his innovations. He was not only the first person in West Texas to earn his living as a writer; he was also the first American writer to develop a new genre of literature—a genre that has come to be closely associated with his name: heroic fantasy. Only now, after fifty years of relative obscurity, are the best of his works receiving worldwide attention. The heroic sweep of his narratives, the vividness of his imagery, and his ability to convey mood, magic, and mystery mark his writing as exceptional.
    Most noteworthy of all of Howard's many stories are those about the barbarian hero Conan of Cimmeria, who lived in an age of Howard's imagining. Howard tells us:
    . . that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyper-borea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom in the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet. 17
    Thus did Robert Howard conjure up under the big sky of Texas a continent that never was but might have been twelve thousand years ago. On it he strewed with lavish hand mountains and seas, brooding forests, meadows bright with flowers, and lurking forces of evil older than Time itself. And in this world he set a man, ill-clad and lone but armed with a strong sword and pride and courage, and to him gave the task of overcoming odds beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.
    Yet the time was not ripe for the coming of Conan. For an entire generation, the great barbarian and his Hyborian world lay forgotten and ignored, only to emerge in triumph a few years ago from the crumbling pages of early magazines. Today the pseudo-historical tales about the giant Cimmerian, which captivate untold numbers of readers, have been dubbed "heroic fantasy" and are regarded by many as an escape literature second to none, save only Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
    While millions of readers are already familiar with the great barbarian either through the twenty-odd books about him or through his appearance in the comics and in the first motion picture that bears his name, for those who know little about