Publisher's Synopsis
This collector-quality edition includes the complete text four of Robert E. Howard's original classic tales of swords and sorcery, magic and mayhem, and high adventure in the Hyborian Age. Howard's indomitable Conan the Barbarian hacks and slashes his way through wizards, warriors and unearthly forces in this freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a large 6"x9" page size, this Summit Classic edition is printed on heavyweight bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers and modern page design that echoes the look and feel of traditional book publishing values exemplify the attention to detail given this volume. This Summit Classics volume contains these original classic tales by Robert E. Howard: A Witch Shall Be Born, 1934 Shadows in Zamboula, 1935 Beyond the Black River, 1935 Red Nails, 1936 Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 - June 11, 1936) was a prolific contributor to a variety of pulp fiction magazines in a writing career cut short by his suicide by gunshot at thirty years of age. In addition to poetry and newspaper content, Howard wrote numerous short stories in a variety of pulp genres, including boxing stories, westerns, detective stories, and historical and contemporary adventure fiction. Best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, Howard is often regarded as the father of the "sword and sorcery" genre, and Conan eclipsed Howard's other popular characters, most notably Solomon Kane. While very widely read in the pulps, Howard's work did not begin to appear in book form until after his death. Sadly, failures to file and renew documents and publish notices then required by copyright law, especially by the publishers of Weird Tales magazine and by Howard himself, allowed much of Howard's work to slip into the public domain quickly. Poor quality, badly-edited short-run editions circulated periodically, and Howard's work became increasingly obscure until the 1960's, and '70's, when quality paperback versions presented an extensive lineup of "Conan" material, and launched the modern revival of Howard's sword-wielding barbarian, leading to comics, movies, new stories (mainly written by others either from whole cloth or unfinished stories and notes by Howard) and the taciturn Cimmerian's status as a major fictional character.
