Despite coming close on several occasions, Howard seemingly preferred not to send his later work to Adventure, even when encouraged to do so by writers he admired. He commented to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, in a letter dated May of 1932: “Kirk Mashburn, a damned good writer, wrote and told me I should have sold it [Sowers of the Thunder] to Adventure – of which he says he hasn’t missed a copy since he found one in a deserted stretch of Florida Everglades many years ago. But if I’d sent it to Adventure, they’d have returned it unread, same as usual.”

Thus, with Oriental Stories a dead market – and Adventure an unreachable one – Howard moved on to greener fields. In 1932, even as he was crafting his tales of the Old Orient, Howard had a notion to turn his love for “the roaring, brawling, drunken, bawdy chaos of the Middle Ages” into a new cycle of stories. They would be historical, after a fashion, easier to research by borrowing from every corner of the past while maintaining the conceit of being about a time before recorded history, a “forgotten Hyborian age.” And the hero of these tales would be a wild barbarian not unlike Cormac FitzGeoffrey or Turlough Dubh O’Brien or even Baibars himself – a Cimmerian called Conan …

An interesting postscript to this epoch of Howard’s life occurred in May of 1936, a month before his untimely death. In a letter, again to H. P. Lovecraft, he sums up the years between 1930 and 1933 with his usual self-deprecation: “Attempts to make a living by writing historical fiction proved a flop.”