There’s a nice piece over on the Morning News (sub. req.) by Carlton Stowers who wrties about his visit to Robert E. Howard Days, an annual June event in the tiny town of Cross Plains in West Texas that honors the writer who create Conan the Barabarian. Howard died in 1936, but the legend he created (which is set for a reemergence on screen with Jason Momoa stepping into the role that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous (and made Arnold famous)

The 25th annual gathering drew fans, scholars and movie folks from as far away as Sweden, France, Germany and Russia to little Cross Plains (pop. 1,000) to honor the man who once lived there with his parents in a little white frame house that still sits on the edge of town. There, Howard biographer Mark Finn tells us, the strange and tragic young man wrote furiously on an old Underwood typewriter, creating a genre that would eventually be known as sword and sorcery fiction.