Robert E. Howard is best known for his cinema and comic book worthy creation, Conan the Barbarian. Though he remains among the few authors of the pulp era of the 1920s and 30s to have sold hundreds of millions of books, comics, and movie tickets after his death, you will be hard pressed to find his work on the few remaining book shelves in these United States. Howard is reviled as a racist and sexist author that committed the unforgivable crime of failing to transcend the norms of his age.

Howard’s work is supposed to promote the taboo values of, masculinity, slavery, sexism and racism. His primary literary charge is that his female and nonwhite characters are nothing but crude stereotypical templates. However, as shall be proven in the following examination of his horror literature—and, unknown to most of his fans and critics, he was, first and foremost, a writer of atmospheric horror—Howard crafted, in his brief and prolific career, empathetically wrought, realistic, and striving female and nonwhite characters. Indeed, one who does not come to his work with the preconceived notion that all white male authors are genetically and hormonally driven to write according to the crudest misconceptions in order to promote Caucasian patriarchy, might well suspect Howard of being overly vested in the crafting of female and nonwhite characters.

As a writer of horror adventure who has received numerous reader and editorial complaints which charge that I have inaccurately represented women and nonwhites as real vested agents of their own destiny, I am well placed to empathize with Howard on this account. Indeed, many of the tales that shall be reviewed in this examination of his work were not sold, and remained unpublished for decades after his death, and often a half century or more. In the early 21st Century, just as in the early 20th Century, the author who presents stories from the viewpoint of, and including, realistically nuanced male and female characters, and characters of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, is destined to be reviled for the crime of not producing race-based and gender-biased fantasies.