Weird Tales

When I was about 10 years old, or perhaps one or two years older, I loved to read Conan comics, especially those illustrated by the British artist Barry W. Smith. The hero Conan was created by Robert Ervin Howard, a Texan born in 1906 in the small town of Peaster, and he more or less invented the heroic fantasy genre we know as Pulp Fantasy.
Howard wrote hard-boiled short stories for Weird Tales Magazine in the 1930s, at a time when other pulp writers, like Lovecraft and Cain, wrote horror or crime stories.
Howard was sort of discovered in the 1960s and 1970s, where other writers tried to copy his dark style, but nobody really succeeded. The original Howard stories outshine their copycats by far.
Like Tolkien, Howard was inspired of ancient European history and myth, especially Celtic and Irish culture.
Unfortunately Howard died far too early when he killed himself in 1936, apparently because of his mother's terminal illness. The story goes like this: Howard typed a small poem on his trusted Underwood typewriter, then got into his Chevy and shot himself in the head. He survived the wound for nearly eight hours, but died 11 June 1936. The four final lines he wrote were:

All fled, all done

So lift me on the pyre

The feast is over

And the lamps expire