Robert E. Howard
Brownwood, Brown County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(January 24, 1906-June 11, 1936) Born in Parker County, Robert Ervin Howard grew up in the Brown and Callahan County communities of Cross Cut, Cross Plains, and Brownwood. He attended Brownwood High School and Howard Payne College, and published his first works of fiction in school newspapers. He later wrote poetry and short stories for popular magazines. His main interest was in science fiction and fantasy. In 1932 he created the character Conan the Barbarian. Howard committed suicide at age 30. His Conan character has become known worldwide through books, magazines, and movies. (1991)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Raised in the small towns of Brown and Callahan counties, Robert E. Howard began publishing fiction while still in school and went on to write poetry and pulp stories for popular magazines. In 1932 he created Conan the Barbarian, virtually inventing the sword-and-sorcery genre before his death by suicide at just thirty. Through books, magazines, and movies, his Conan has since become a worldwide cultural figure.
Why it matters
Howard is a founding voice of American pulp and fantasy fiction, showing how a young writer in rural Texas could shape a genre now known around the globe.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Robert E. Howard grew up in central Texas in the early 1900s, when oil booms, drought and the rhythms of farm and ranch life shaped small towns across the region. The communities of Brown and Callahan counties where he spent his youth were places of dusty main streets and sudden fortunes, and of hard times when the booms faded.
His adult years ran straight into the Great Depression. Money was scarce everywhere, and entertainment had to be cheap. That was the golden age of the "pulps": inexpensive magazines printed on rough wood-pulp paper and filled with adventure, detective, horror and fantasy stories. For a reader with a dime, they offered escape. For a writer, they offered a rare chance to earn a living from imagination.
That was the landscape Howard entered. Here was a young man in a small Texas town, far from the publishing houses of New York, mailing his stories to editors who had never met him.
People & events
Howard's path to writing started early. He was born in Parker County and moved with his family through several small communities before settling in the region around Cross Plains and Brownwood. He attended Brownwood High School and Howard Payne College, and his first published fiction appeared in school newspapers, the humble start of a remarkable career.
He went on to write poetry and stories for popular magazines and became one of the best-known contributors to Weird Tales, the famous pulp of fantasy and the strange. He corresponded at length with other writers of that circle, most famously H. P. Lovecraft, trading ideas and arguments by mail across the country.
In 1932 he created Conan the Barbarian, a wandering warrior in a vivid, invented ancient world. Conan was muscular, restless and fiercely independent, and he carried readers into lost kingdoms full of sorcery and danger. Howard wrote with a pounding energy that set his work apart.
His life ended tragically at just 30, by suicide. That loss has long been part of how readers remember him. It is a reminder that great creative gifts do not protect anyone from despair, and that his story deserves to be told with compassion.
Its place in the American story
Howard is widely regarded as a founder of the fantasy genre now called "sword and sorcery." Before Conan, heroic fantasy existed, but Howard gave it a new pace, grit and swagger. Generations of later writers, illustrators and game designers have worked in the tradition he helped establish.
Conan outgrew the pulps entirely. As the marker notes, he became known worldwide through books, magazines and movies. The 1980s film brought the character to a vast new audience, and Conan has continued to appear in comics and games. Few characters created in American pulp fiction have traveled as far.
Howard's story also says something about American culture. Popular fiction, often dismissed in its day as cheap entertainment, could spring from anywhere, including a small town in west-central Texas. It could reshape the imagination of readers around the globe.
If you visit
This marker in Brownwood places you in the landscape where Howard went to school and first saw his words in print. Stand here and think about a young writer dreaming up jungles, deserts and lost empires while living among mesquite and pasture land.
Fans of fantasy will want to go on to nearby Cross Plains, where the Howard family home has been preserved as a museum dedicated to his life and work. Together, the two towns make a meaningful literary pilgrimage.
This stretch of central Texas rewards slow travel: small-town squares, open ranch country and big skies. Bring a paperback of Howard's stories for the road. Reading Conan in the country where he was imagined is its own kind of adventure.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
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Themes & tags
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