Robert E. Howard was born in Peaster, Texas on January 22, 1906. At the beginning of his writing career, he primarily wrote pulp fiction and had numerous stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales including Spear and Fang, The Hyena, Wolfshead, Red Shadows, and The Shadow Kingdom. He created the character of Conan the Barbarian in the pages of Weird Tales. By 1936, almost all of his fiction writing was in the western genre and his first novel, A Gent from Bear Creek, was about to be published. He committed suicide on June 11, 1936 at the age of 30.