There is probably no worse place to be lost than West Texas. The scenery leaves something to be desired, dusty grays and reds dotted by cactus and mesquite trees, roads stretching endlessly to nowhere. Well, I was indeed lost several years ago, attempting to take a short cut from Austin to Abilene to enjoy the summer countryside of this rough part of the Lone Star State. I was to cover a regional basketball tournament located at a college in Abilene. I took a turn here, a turn there, next thing I know I'm in the town of Cross Plains.

There's not much to Cross Plains, a Main Street, a stop light, farming, agriculture and about 1,200 residents. It is as faceless as the hundreds of other faceless towns one drives through en route to some off-road destination. Small town people, leading small town lives, content, happy, if a bit suspicious of outsiders. I notice a sign that reads "Home of Conan."

Every small town has a "Welcome To...." sign, with writing beneath proclaiming a reason for local civic pride, a state football champion from 30 years ago, a former actor/actress unlucky enough to have been born there. Cross Plains, amazingly, was the hometown of Robert E. Howard, one of the greatest fantasy writers in history and the creator of Conan the Barbarian. I can't explain how shocking this was to me, and for this man to have written all of his work in this dusty, cotton farming nowhere of a crap town.

I stayed for an hour, driving to the white-frame house on the outskirts of town where Howard lived with his parents. I stared into the side room where he wrote his stories, including the Conan series, westerns, boxing yarns, swords and sorcery epics, horror tales and an immense correspondence with the one and only H.P. Lovecraft - all during a 12-year period in the 1920s and 1930s. Absolutely fucking amazing.

Howard was an oddball, to say the least. He would go to town adorned in a sombrero or walk down the street boxing with imaginary foes. He was said to narrate his stories aloud while pounding away on a manual typewriter, his voice echoing down the block until late hours of the night (most of you kids are probably unaware manual typewriters were once very popular with writers - I know, hard to believe). He worked a variety of odd jobs including soda clerk, freight loader and secretary, before settling on writing.

Howard published his first story, "Spear and Fang" in the magazine Weird Tales at the age of 18. By most reports, Howard was a voracious reader, devouring European history, Gothic poetry and pulp magazines. He would act out his stories in the front yard with friends, tree branches serving as swords and rifles. Over the next 12 years of his life, Howard would be published in such varied magazines as Action Stories, Fight Stories, Spicy Adventure and Strange Detective. Many of these stories and the characters he created, among them Conan, Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, El Borak and Sailor Steve Costigan, are to this day still in print.