started the trend by publishing Skull-Face and Others (1946), one of only four deluxe omnibus volumes in the company's history. Early appreciation for Howard's work came more from fellow writers than from critics. In his book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, de Camp describes an interview with J. R. R. Tolkien in which he "indicated that he rather liked Howard's Conan stories." Serious Howard scholarship began with the 1983 publication of de Camp's biography of Robert E. Howard, Dark Valley Destiny. This was based on The Miscast Barbarian, a shorter piece de Camp had published in 1975; he expanded on his earlier effort with the assistance of his wife, Catherine de Camp, and a former teacher named Jane Whittington Griffin. The three conducted interviews among those people who had known Howard, who were still alive and who were willing to talk to them. A current opinion is their material was tainted, however, due to de Camp's preconceived bias that Howard was an intensely troubled man. De Camp focused on information that would support his view of Howard's suicide. The book met with a mixed reception and many fans considered it outright character assassination, while others praise it. The interviews notes themselves are now archived with the rest of de Camp's papers in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Don Herron, in the acknowledgement for his book The Dark Barbarian, wrote that "with his uninspired 'additions' to the Conan canon, and especially for mixing his own stories and those of his inept collaborator Lin Carter in with Howard's own fiction, de Camp's reputation has been in steep decline in Howardian circles as the purist movement has come fully to the forefront. But he researched the biography at a time when many people who had known Howard personally were still alive, and so preserved valuable information that might otherwise have been lost." More scholarly books followed from other sources. The first was The Dark Barbarian (1984), a collection of essays about Howard's literary works edited by noted critic Don Herron, who earlier had penned the seminal essay, "Conan vs. Conantics". The Dark Barbarian was the first critical volume on Howard to appear by an academic press, and has since been followed by a 2004 sequel titled The Barbaric Triumph. This was followed by Robert E. Howard (1987), number 35 of The Starmont Reader's Guide series, written by Marc