A Probable Outline of Conan's Career

Excerpted from...
A Brief Note,
by Roy Thomas

Two of Conan's (and Robert E. Howrd's) greatest admirers were P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark, themselves sometime contributors the the Weird Tales magazine which introduced the swashbuckling Cimmerian to a waiting world. In fact, they went rather farther than mere admiration; they noted that, though Conan's adventures took place in many lands, over more than two-score years, there was still a logical progression to them. And so, these two cognoscenti wrote A Probable Outline of Conan's Career, using both interior evidence from the stories and a few helpful hints from Howard himself shortly before his untimely death.

This outline covers all the Conan tales published before Robert E. Howard's demise in 1936, and was itself printed in a small fanzine called The Hyborian Age in 1938. Only four stories which were completed by Howard are not included: The God in the Bowl (one of Conan's earliest exploits, chronologically falling between The Tower of the Elephant and Rogues in the House), The Frost Giant's Daugther (which occurs during one of his brief returns to his native haunts), The Vale of Lost Women (which takes place not long after the death of Belit, the pirate queen), and The Black Stranger (later published as The Treasure of Tranicos, and occuring not long before Conan usurped the throne of Aquilonia).

Since the outline's publication, other writers such as L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg hve added appreciably to the Conan canon, both by completing stories left unfinished by Howard and by writing pastiches of their own. Lancer Books, publishers of the Conan paperback series, may soon issue a volume which would include a fuller Informal Biography of Conan, and indeed the latter has already been printed in Amra and other places.