Short answers, pulled from the story.
Robert E. Howard was an American pulp fiction writer born on the 22nd of January 1906 in Peaster, Texas, who died on the 11th of June 1936. He wrote across multiple genres and created characters including Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and Sailor Steve Costigan. He is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
Howard conceived the land of Cimmeria in early 1932 while traveling through southern Texas, and the Conan character developed over nine months. He reworked an unpublished Kull story called "By This Axe I Rule!" into the first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword", and built a full fictional world documented in an 8,000-word essay called "The Hyborian Age" supported by two hand-sketched maps. Conan first appeared publicly in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales.
On the morning of the 11th of June 1936, Howard was told by his mother's nurse that his mother would never regain consciousness from her coma. He walked to his car, retrieved a .380 Colt Automatic pistol, and shot himself in the head. He had made veiled references to suicidal plans to both his father and Novalyne Price during 1935 and 1936 as his mother's health declined. He died eight hours later; his mother died the following day.
Howard initiated contact in August 1930 with a letter to Weird Tales praising Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls". Editor Farnsworth Wright forwarded it to Lovecraft, who responded warmly, beginning a correspondence that lasted until Howard's death. Howard contributed several stories to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and became a member of the Lovecraft Circle. The two held opposite philosophical views on barbarism versus civilization, a debate that shaped much of Howard's fiction.
Howard spent most of his life in Cross Plains, Texas, having moved there with his family in 1919 when he was thirteen. He had previously lived in at least nine Texas towns as a child. Witnessing oil boomtowns expand and collapse, hearing firsthand accounts of gunfights and frontier violence, and observing the social disruption caused by the Cross Plains oil boom of 1920 shaped his recurring literary theme: civilizations rising, becoming corrupt, and falling to barbarian forces.
Sword and sorcery is a fantasy subgenre combining action, swordplay, horror, mythology, and historical romance in exotic settings. Howard is regarded as its father. The first published example of the genre is considered to be "Red Shadows", a Solomon Kane story that appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales, predating the first Kull story in print. The genre grew from Howard's work and produced many imitators, including later writers such as Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, and Steven Erikson.