Howard raised up his barbarian from youthful thief to ruler of a powerful kingdom.

Particularly towards the end of his career…

And still, they point out wistfully, the saga is not complete. Nonetheless, there remain a few nostalgic completists who value the expanded Conan canon, if for no other reason than the occasional gem that appeared in the burgeoning mountain of chaff. The Conan tales currently in print largely consist of Howard’s writings alone, with the myriad added episodes fading into memory. Since the collapse the purists have gotten their wish. Everywhere he went he stumbled over ambitious necromancers, eldritch monsters, and lost cities steeped in ancient evils-experiences that apparently taught him nothing, as he never grew any better prepared to face the subsequent horrors that inevitably marshaled their claws, fangs and chutzpah against him. The expanded saga hardly left the Cimmerian room to breathe between such adventures. Howard’s own Conan tales represented a few supernatural encounters culled from a life we may presume was comprised mostly of less spectacular events. Meanwhile, the phenomenon they decried merely built up steam under the guidance of de Camp, no sooner was the twelve volume saga complete than it birthed half a dozen more and change, and ultimately a series of fat add-on novels from Tor Books, which cranked out several per year until the Conan industry finally collapsed under its own weight in the mid-1990s. Inevitably, a reaction set in, and by the late 70s Howard “purists” were rejecting both the reorganization and the continuations, calling for the canon to be pared back to the original Howardian corpus. This hodgepodge proved irresistible to his followers, who were inspired first to reorganize them into an assumed chronological order and later to fill in the perceived gaps in their hero’s biography.īeginning in a small way, the process was in full bloom by the middle of the 1960s, when a “complete” saga of twelve volumes was projected. Howard wrote or at least started about two dozen stories of his primitive protagonist, miscellaneous snapshots culled from what he envisioned as a long lifetime of adventure. Sprague de Camp and other writers inspired by the original author first ventured to add to the saga. Howard’s barbarian pulp hero Conan of Cimmeria have been the basis of a cottage industry ever since the 1950s, when L.

Tor publishing website reorganization