Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. During his last decade, this prolific and versatile writer turned out a large volume of what was then called "pulp fiction"-sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, weird, and ghost stories, as well as his many stories of adventure fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Jack London, and H. P. Lovecraft (of whom he was a pen pal) all influenced him. At the age of thirty, he ended a promising literary career by suicide.

Conajohara:
A province on the Aquilonian frontier between the Black and Thunder Rivers. From Canajoharie, a town on the Mohawk River, New York State. Upstate New York also has a Black River, and Howard probably derived both town and river from
Robert W. Chambers's stories.

Black River:
A river on the westem Aquilonian frontier. Probably from the Black River in upstate New York mentioned in the frontier stories of Robert W. Chambers.

Erlik:
A Turanian god. The name of a god of the underworld of the Altai Tatars. Howard possibly got his Erlik from Robert W. Chambers's novel, The Slayer of Souls, which exploits this deity. Howard also brought "priests of Erlik" into a fantasy with a modern setting, "Black Hound of Death" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1936).

Introduction
by L. Sprague de Camp
Current source: Conan of Cimmeria, by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Ace Books, New York, NY (1969)

The stories "Beyond the Black River," "The Treasure of Tranicos," and "Wolves Beyond the Border" are derived from the Indian-fighting novels of Robert W. Chambers, which were often laid in upstate New York, and possibly also from the novels of J. Fenimore Cooper

The New York Times, November 29, 1902