“WHERE Y’ALL FROM? IS THIS YOUR first time here?” The door to the Robert E. Howard House and Museum in Cross Plains swings open, and a volunteer in a red polo shirt greets a group of visitors. The clapboard house’s narrow hallway is noisy and crowded with travelers from Dallas, New York, California and Japan. They’ve come to envision the home as it was in the 1920s, when Howard lived here with his physician father and chronically ill mother. In a porch converted to a tiny bedroom, he typed up to 12 hours a day, spinning stories about his most famous character, Conan the Barbarian, along with other fantasy stories, Westerns, boxing stories, pirate stories, horror stories and “sword and sorcery,” a genre Howard is credited with inventing. Just outside…
