Robert E. Howard, more than anything, wanted to sell to Adventure Magazine. This publication of the Buttrick Co. was considered by many the best Pulp of all the hundreds of cheap magazines published between the 1920s and 1950s. It featured writers like Talbot Mundy, James Francis Dwyer, Rafael Sabatini, H. Bedford-Jones, Arthur Howden Smith, Arthur O. Friel and many others. E. Hoffman price, who wrote for Adventure, and was a friend of Howard’s, attributed REH’s failure to sell to the magazine to his lack of factual detail. Howard could make it up but he did not have the studious ability to research thoroughly.
Adventure’s loss was Fantasy’s gain. The stories that Howard wrote for Adventure would eventually end up in Weird Tales with fantastic elements added. In this way Howard inaugurated a second type of Sword & Sorcery, one set in a historical milieu, a type of Fantasy made famous by Adventure‘s greatest writer, Talbot Mundy in his mega-novel Tros of Samothrace (1925). This sprawling saga follows Tros, the exiled king of Samothrace, as he fights the Romans in the land of Britain. Mundy mixes history with supposition, theosophy and Arthuriana.
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