Furthermore, Howard’s contemporary Clark Ashton Smith is notable for his own contribution to the genre, not the least of which were his own Hyperborean tales, set, like Howard’s, in a lost mythical age. In this case, though, his Hyperborea was an Arctic continent, the last gasps of a civilization facing the encroachment of an Ice Age. By peopling them with sorcerers and strange deities, Smith seemed to merge the worlds of Robert E. Howard with that of the third great writer from this era of Weird Tales, their friend H. P. Lovecraft.
Come the 1960s, however, the sword and sorcery genre, with the exception of Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, had waned in popularity, until writer Lin Carter crafted the first successful ongoing series in imitation of Howard’s Conan. Carter’s Thongor series, beginning with The Wizard of Lemuria in 1965, blended Howard’s barbarian with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Set across the lost continent of Lemuria, they featured magic, flying machines, and mankind’s attempts to throw off the shackles of a serpentine race of “Dragon Kings.” Carter’s Thongor tales diminished, however, when he was recruited by L. Sprague de Camp to assist in a Conan revival.
De Camp had contributed his own notable sword and sorcery in the 1950s. His Pusadian series was an attempt to write in a Hyperborean setting that paid more attention to what was then known about the geology of the earth. But beginning in the 1950s, though primarily in the 1960s, de Camp began to work to republish the existing Conan tales, as well as to publish the many Howard-penned Conan stories unpublished in the author’s lifetime.