Howard, the writers who influenced him, and many of those that came after in the same heroic vein seem more outside the pale of literary respectability than they would have been a century ago. It is not just the artificial divide between Literature with a capital L and popular genre fiction, or the modern disdain for the writers of the past. The even greater divide is between unironically portraying heroism in the West and despising it and deconstructing it in order to bring about its demise.