I trust that, knowing now that I’m actually a historian at Vanderbilt, you will appreciate the serious, scholarly research that went into this.
At the time of his death in 1936, thirty-year-old Robert E. Howard had published hundreds of works of fiction across an astonishingly broad swath of genres. His voluminous output, according to Paul Herman of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, is estimated to have been “approximately 3.5 million words of fiction, poetry, letters and articles.” Among those millions of words were the iconic stories of Conan the Cimmerian, a character whose popularity has firmly established Howard’s reputation as the father of heroic fantasy, parallel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s place as father of epic fantasy.
via Sword and Sensibility: Conan Creator Robert E. Howard’s Lesser Known Collaboration | Tor.com.
That is a magnificent find, Mary. What a stroke of good luck!