With Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard created more than the greatest action hero of the twentieth century—he also launched a genre that came to be known as sword and sorcery. But Conan wasn’t the first archetypal adventurer to spring from Howard’s fertile imagination.  *“He was . . . a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch ...