This article covers some of the major Conan chronologies that have been advanced over the years. From the 1930s onward a number of fans and scholars have analyzed the numerous Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and later writers, and attempted to organize them into a chronological timeline. A number of factors have prevented the establishment of a consensus on order of the Conan stories, most notably the fact that Howard himself apparently had little more than a general idea of the character's career path and intentionally wrote the stories out of chronological sequence.