Howard was a brash young man from Texas who created some of fictions most enduring, if brutish, heroes. Conan the Cimmerian is by far the most famous, and arguably the most famous character ever to emerge from our pages. Conan became a household name because of the enormous success of the Lancer Books reprints of the Conan stories—including many that were originally written about other characters but revised by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter—and the box-office success of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s films, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. Sadly, Howard was a troubled person and took his own life in the mid-1930s, but his legacy lives on. Various publishers hired a bevy of top writers to pen new Conan tales—including Andrew J. Offut, Karl Edward Wagner, John C. Hocking, Sean A. Moore, Poul Anderson, Leonard Carpenter, Steve Perry, John M. Roberts, Roland Green, Harry Turtledove (leading creator of the alt-history sub-genre) and Robert Jordan (author of the magnificent Wheel of Time novels, now on cable). And Marvel Comics established a long-running and wildly popular Conan the Barbarian comic book that ran for 275 issues, with Roy Thomas writing the first 115 issues.

Howard would go on to write fifty-four stories for Weird Tales before, sadly, he took his own life.

As for Lovecraft, he was a moody writer from Providence, Rhode Island who took elements of cosmic horror first established by Robert W. Chambers in his disturbing 1895 book, The King in Yellow, and greatly expanded upon it. The sheer scale of Lovecraft’s vision is incalculable. And he did something unique that echoes a century later—he invited other writers to take his story elements and use it for their own works. That opened a floodgate of new cosmic horror stories—variously known as “Lovecraftian” or the “Cthulhu Mythos” (if those writers borrowed certain specific characters). The list of writers then and since who have penned these kinds of stories would likely fill every single page of this book, front and back. And, no, that’s not really an exaggeration.