The Hour of the Dragon
core novel 1935 Conan the Barbarian
Record
| First published | 1935 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.11 (5,059 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| Page count | 296 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463896 |
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan the Barbarian
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 15 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Howard's only full-length Conan novel; serialized in 5 parts, Weird Tales Dec 1935-Apr 1936. Also submitted as a standalone book to UK publisher Dennis Archer in 1934, who went bankrupt before printing; first true book publication was the 1950 Gnome Press edition (retitled 'Conan the Conqueror').
- From the series record (The Conan Stories): 20 works wholly written by Robert E. Howard himself (16 published in his lifetime, 1932-1936, plus 4 complete manuscripts he finished but that were rejected by Weird Tales and only published posthumously in his own unaltered text, 1954-1996), the modern Del Rey 'Original Conan' trilogy (ed. Patrice Louinet, 2002-2005) presents all 20 together as the definitive, textually-restored, Howard-only edition. No internal in-story chronological order is recorded here: at least six independent, mutually disagreeing chronologies have been proposed by different editors/scholars since 1936 (Miller/Clark, de Camp's two versions, William Galen Gray, Joe Marek, Dale Rippke), and Howard himself is documented as having 'had little more than a general idea of the character's career path' and deliberately wrote the stories out of sequence, the same principled non-invention applied to Steven Brust's Dragaera. Book order here follows first-publication-of-the-actual-registered-text year, which is a sourced fact, not an invented reading order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Conan Stories: position 15 of 20: previous Shadows in Zamboula (1935) · next Red Nails (1936)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
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