Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American pulp fiction writer who published in a variety of pulp literary genres: fantasy, western, detective, science fiction, historical adventure. He is internationally known for his sword and sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, who has been adapted into a variety of popular medias, such as comic books, films, cartoons, video games, roleplaying games, and many more. Howard's ubiquity in popular culture notwithstanding, he was also, and emphatically so, an ambitious literary artist whose poetry and fiction merits investigation by literary critics, historians, philosophers, and other humanists interested in interwar America and the cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic significance of pulp fiction. The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the academic study of Howard's literary works as well as the literary historical and print culture contexts associated with it. The journal seeks to publish full-length articles, brief scholarly notes and commentaries, bibliographies, reviews of books, and other scholarship that treats Howard's life, time, literary work, and associated topics such as Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft, and the concept of a transhistorical pulp aesthetic.