Robert E. Howard books come with a warning most authors don’t need: make sure you’re actually reading Howard.
He invented sword and sorcery, created Conan, and died by his own hand at thirty, having written over three hundred stories and seven hundred poems in barely a decade. Then, for the next fifty years, other writers got hold of Conan. L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and others rewrote his stories, finished his fragments, reordered everything into a manufactured chronology, and wrote whole new Conan tales in his name. The version of Conan most of the twentieth century read was substantially not Howard’s, and it’s weaker, smoothed-out, and stripped of the raw, headlong quality that made the originals matter.
So the single most useful thing this guide can tell you is which editions to buy, because with Howard the edition is the whole game. Get it right and you get one of the great prose stylists of pulp fiction. Get it wrong and you get well-meaning fan fiction with his name on the cover.
Howard is on my best fantasy books list and my classic fantasy list, where Conan sits as the origin of the whole subgenre. This is the guide to the author and the messy business of reading him properly.
Fiction by René Rehn
The edition problem, solved
Buy the Del Rey editions. This is the near-unanimous verdict of Howard readers and it’s correct.
In the early 2000s, Wandering Star and then Del Rey published Conan in three volumes that restore Howard’s original texts, in the order he wrote them, with no de Camp rewrites, no pastiche, and no interpolated stories by other hands. They are: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan. Between them they contain every Conan story Howard actually wrote, and nothing he didn’t.
Avoid the older Lancer and Ace paperbacks with the de Camp and Carter names on them, however iconic their Frazetta covers, because those are the reordered, rewritten versions. If a Conan collection credits anyone but Howard as author, it’s the wrong one.
Del Rey did the same restoration for his other major characters, and those volumes are the way to read all of it.
Conan the Cimmerian
Read in publication order. Each story stands alone.
The character who defined a genre, and far more intelligent than his imitators made him.
Conan is a Cimmerian barbarian who wanders the Hyborian Age, a fictional prehistoric epoch of Howard’s invention, working across his life as a thief, a mercenary, a pirate, and eventually a king. The crucial thing to understand is that Howard never wrote Conan as a chronological saga. He wrote standalone stories, jumping around Conan’s life at will, publishing them out of any internal order, so there’s no beginning-middle-end to follow. You can start anywhere, and publication order, which the Del Rey volumes follow, is the way most readers recommend, because it lets you watch Howard develop.
The pacing is the revelation for anyone expecting clumsy pulp. Howard writes action with a physical intensity almost nobody has matched, and Conan himself is a strategist and a survivor, not a meathead. The stories range widely: “The Tower of the Elephant” is the usual first recommendation and blends adventure with genuine cosmic horror. “Red Nails” is a decadent, claustrophobic masterpiece. “The God in the Bowl” is essentially a locked-room murder mystery.
The Hour of the Dragon, Howard’s only full-length Conan novel, is frequently named the best single Conan work and a natural capstone. It’s the one place the character gets a novel-length arc, and Howard proves he could sustain across three hundred pages what he’d perfected across thirty.
Fair warning, and it applies across all of Howard: the racial attitudes are those of a white Texan writing for pulp magazines in the early 1930s, and they surface exactly as you’d fear in places. It’s real, it’s period, and it’s worth knowing before you start rather than being ambushed by it.
Solomon Kane
The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Del Rey.
The best of Howard beyond Conan, and for some readers his most compelling creation.
Solomon Kane is a dour, humorless sixteenth-century English Puritan who roams the world, England, the Continent, and deepest Africa, driven by an implacable need to destroy evil wherever he finds it. He fights pirates, sorcerers, vampires, and worse, and Howard writes him as a genuine psychological study: a man who claims to serve God but is really driven by something darker and more personal, a hunger for vengeance he dresses up as righteousness.
The stories are eerier and more overtly supernatural than Conan, drifting toward outright horror, and the African tales in particular have a fever-dream intensity. Kane is Howard’s most morally complex character, and the Del Rey collection gathers the complete stories including the unfinished fragments.
If Conan is Howard’s id, Kane is his conscience at war with itself.
Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and the Others
Various Del Rey collections.
The deeper Howard, worth knowing once Conan and Kane have you.
Kull of Atlantis predates Conan and is in some ways his prototype: a barbarian who becomes king of an ancient civilization, but more introspective and philosophical than Conan ever is, prone to brooding on the nature of reality and identity. “The Shadow Kingdom” is a foundational sword and sorcery text. Conan’s first story was actually a rewritten Kull story, which tells you the lineage.
Bran Mak Morn is the last king of the Picts, fighting a doomed rearguard against Rome, and these are among Howard’s most emotionally charged stories, shot through with his characteristic theme of barbarism’s losing war against civilization. “Worms of the Earth” is the standout and one of his finest pieces of horror.
Beyond those, Howard wrote voluminously outside fantasy entirely: boxing stories, Westerns, historical adventures, and a substantial body of horror in the orbit of his friend and correspondent H. P. Lovecraft. His weird fiction, collected in volumes like The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, is genuinely strong and much less known, and it’s where his Lovecraftian side lives.
On the man
Worth knowing, because it shadows the work. Howard was a Texan who spent his whole short life in the small town of Cross Plains, wrote at furious speed to support himself and his ailing mother, and corresponded intensely with Lovecraft about civilization, barbarism, and history, arguments that feed directly into the fiction. When his mother entered a terminal coma in 1936, Howard walked to his car and shot himself. He was thirty.
He left behind a body of work that a generation of other writers then obscured, and the modern Del Rey restorations are, more than anything, an act of giving him back his own voice. Read those, and you’re reading one of the most influential and genuinely gifted writers pulp fiction ever produced.
A note on where to actually start
The real answer: buy The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first Del Rey volume, and read “The Tower of the Elephant” first. It’s Howard at his best, it shows the surprising depth under the muscle, and it’ll tell you within twenty pages whether his headlong, vivid, brutal style is for you.
If Conan grabs you, the other two Del Rey Conan volumes and The Hour of the Dragon are the rest of the essential core. If you want to see his range, Solomon Kane next. And whatever you do, if a cover credits someone other than Robert E. Howard, put it back.
