Plains. When Howard died, Weird Tales still owed him between $800 and $1,300. (Adjusted for inflation, this amount would be equivalent to between $ and $.) Letters Three publishing houses have put out collections of Howard's letters. In 1989 and 1991, Necronomicon Press published Robert E. Howard: Selected Letters in two volumes (1923–1930 and 1931–1936) edited by Glenn Lord with Rusty Burke, S. T. Joshi, and Steve Behrends. In 2007 and 2008, The Robert E. Howard Foundation Press published a three volume set (1923–1929, 1930–1932, and 1933–1936) titled The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, edited by Rob Roehm. Additionally, in 2009, Hippocampus Press published two volumes (1930–1932 and 1933–1936) of Howard's correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft as A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft & Robert E. Howard, edited by S. T. Joshi, David Schultz, and Rusty Burke. Legacy Robert E. Howard's legacy extended after his death in 1936. Howard's most famous character, Conan the Barbarian, has a pop-culture imprint that has been compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond. Howard's critical reputation suffered at first but over the decades works of Howard scholarship have been published. The first professionally published example of this was L. Sprague de Camp's Dark Valley Destiny (1983) which was followed by other works, including Don Herron's The Dark Barbarian (1984) and Mark Finn's Blood & Thunder (2006). Also in 2006, a charity, Robert E. Howard Foundation, was created to promote further scholarship. Following Robert E. Howard's death, the courts granted his estate to his father, who continued to work with Howard's literary agent Otis Adelbert Kline. Dr. Isaac Howard passed the rights on to his friend Dr. Pere Kuykendall, who passed them to his wife, Alla Ray Kuykendall, and daughter, Alla Ray Morris. Morris left the rights to the widow of her cousin, Zora Mae Bryant, who gave control to her children, Jack Baum and Terry Baum Rogers. The Baums eventually sold their rights to the Swedish (now US) company Paradox Entertainment. Howard's first published novel, A Gent from Bear Creek, was printed in Britain one year after his death. This was followed in the United States by a collection of Howard's stories, Skull-Face and Others (1946) and then the novel Conan the Conqueror (1950). The success of Conan the Conqueror led to a series of Conan books from publisher Gnome Press,