Delany speaks of "the pathos and glory of the non-family-anchored hero" (65)
"The non-family-anchored hero in literature begins to come into its own with the hero of Knut Hamsun's Hunger"
expanded upon by "Hamsun's disciple Henry Miller"
"Both science fiction and sword and sorcery also tend to feature non-family-anchored heroes. (Personally, what I'm interested in is what type of object the family becomes when, within such a genre, you do turn and examine it with the appropriate modicum of fantasy and analysis.)"
"[T]he hero of the Sword-and-Sorcery tale is not the prince with his endless entanglements [...] Rather, he is the unencumbered troll"
Conan, plus a long list of others on 65