The De Camps love their Freud just a tad too much, as any time they don't have actual evidence or proof of something, they throw in psychoanalytic babble. It's informative for some of its facts (and at the time of its publication, there weren't that many other sources of information), but its suppositions and extrapolations keep this from being a solid reference. ( )

This book is essential to the study of Robert E. Howard simply because it's the only book of its sort that exists. The de Camps carried out interviews of people who knew Howard and his family while they were still alive, and did their best to reconstruct his life. However, they were no scholars, and the book falls very short of what one would like. They often use Howard's fiction as though it is accurate autobiography, and the attempted psychoanalysis of the author, aided by psychologist Griffin (who died before the book was completed, leaving us to wonder how accurate even she would find the analysis) is annoying rather than illuminating. The book does contain some very interesting information, though one wonders what was lost due to poor analysis.

Robert E. Howard still awaits the biographer who will do him justice. ( )

Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard is a 1983 biography of the writer Robert E. Howard by science-fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp in collaboration with Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin, first published by Bluejay Books.

The work, an examination of the famous fantasy writer and creator of Conan the Barbarian, was the first major independent biography of Howard. It is an expansion of de Camp's earlier study The Miscast Barbarian: a Biography of Robert E. Howard (1975), itself an expansion of his article "The Miscast Barbarian", which appeared in the magazine Fantastic in June, 1971.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Valley_Destiny:_the_Life_of_Robert_E._Howard