John J. Miller of National Review has put together a nice overview of Robert E. Howard’s "Conan the Barbarian" tales, for the Wall Street Journal. Miller notes that Conan has been a highly popular character in the original pulp tales and subsequent comic books, movies, and simply as a widely known fictional character. Miller’s article is well worth reading as an introduction to this important literary phenomenon. Conan was the muscular, aggressive hero of 21 narratives the lonely, unhappy, Texas-born and -based Howard wrote in the pulp era. Miller does a good job of describing the character and his influence: With Conan, Howard created a protagonist whose name is almost as familiar as Tarzan’s. In his influential essay on Howard, Don Herron credits the Texan with begetting the "hard-boiled" epic hero, and doing for fantasy what Dashiell Hammett did for detective fiction. Suddenly, the world–even a make-believe one such as Conan’s Hyboria–was rendered seamier and more violent, and Howard described it in spare rather than lush prose. Conan has a knack for locating damsels in distress, but he is no knight in shining armor who piously obeys a code of chivalry. Instead, he is a black-haired berserker from a wild

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