Agreed. I don't think it's an overestimation to say he is one of the most important writers of the 20th century and his suicide at 30 was an incalculable loss to world literature.
If you want to get into Conan, I always recommend reading in publishing order rather than chronological. Choosing a good compendium isn't quite as hard as getting into
Elric, but
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (2002, Del Rey Books) is in my view the definitive in-road into Howard's masterwork. It also has some nice Marc Schultz illustrations in the AD&D vein.
Cover for reference:
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Getting the entire Del Rey set of REH works is pretty good. It's 3 volumes of Conan, 1 for Kull, 1 for Bran Mak Morn, 1 for Solomon Kane, 1 for Historical Adventures (Red Sonja and Dark Agnes too), 1 for El Borak, and then one for the Horror Stories. There's also the two volumes of REH's "best of", but that overlaps with everything else.
Another thing I recommend is just grabbing the ebooks. Plenty of REH's work in in the public domain.
There's also the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press which collects everything in themed volumes or by character. It's all easy to access.
REH's character have plenty of continued pastiche fiction, which can be hit or miss. But when the writers successfully capture the spirit, they do it well.
Anyways, the three big writers of the Weird Tales pulp mag have had a nutty influence on pop culture and media. Lovecraft is the most influential horror writer of the 20th century, REH was a major fantasy influence, and even Clark Ashton Smith has tons of influence. He's just a bit more under the radar, but he's essential to the atmosphere of DnD and dark fantasy and dying earth. When I think of dungeons, gothic fantasies, dark worlds, and all that, I think of Smith.
Anyways for more Sword and Sorcery stuff, all the early attempts at following up REH also came out of Weird Tales. Henry Kuttner's Elak, C. L. Moore's Jirel, Fritz Leiber's Lankmar (don't recall if those were in Weird Tales, but Leiber got his start in that pulp and was a Lovecraft circle member). I also recall Manly Wade Wellman, the writer who created Silver John/John The Balladeer, to have also done quite a few sword and sorcery tales. Hell, plenty of the old SF-F writers of the midcentury era did S&S at one point. Jack Williamson, Avram Davidson, L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson, and John Jakes are just a few of the bigger names.
Hell, you could say that Sword and Sorcery was basically the next evolution in swashbuckling adventure tales after Edgar Rice Burroughs' popularized Sword and Planet/Planetary Romances with the John Carter books. That genre has a ton of good stuff in it. Burroughs is the gold standard, but you also had Otis Adelbert Kline and Leigh Brackett. Some folks consider Leigh Brackett and her sword & planet stories to be the successor to Robert E. Howard's spirit after he died. Brackett is very very solid. Highly under-appreciated.
he's a lightning in a bottle, not a degenerate, all perfect.....
Guess the universe only loves the evil and degenerate or maybe it loves drama
There turned out to be plenty of fantasy writers who could get a lot of S&S right, but noone could do the action quite like REH.
You had horror writers, theater actors, and all sorts of pulpsters trying to write S&S. Some came close to REH. But the best ones were always able to distinct themselves by not retreading REH (Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, etc.).
