The father of "sword- and- sorcery" fiction was Robert E. Howard (1906–36), an unlikely creator for such a wide-ranging and adventurous form. He lived all his short life in small-town Texas and shot himself at age 30, seemingly out of depression over his mother's incurable illness. Between 1924 and 1936, however, he published a prodigious amount of fiction (around three million words) in the era's pulp magazines. He wrote boxing stories, horror stories, Westerns and historical romances of the sort collected in "Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures." He was paid a penny a line, if he was...