How Edgar Rice Burroughs became one of the twentieth century's biggest scifi authors

In 1911, a 36-year old loser, his latest business venture crumbling into insolvency, started to while away his idle hours at the office by writing a novel for the then-new "pulp" magazines. It was about a man going to Mars.

The story he wrote, a swashbuckling tale of action, adventure, and romance set on the dying Red Planet, was so outré he used the pen name "Norman Bean" lest the readers think the author a bit cracked.


http://io9.com/5616081/how-edgar-rice-burroughs-became-one-of-the-twentieth-centurys-biggest-scifi-authors?skyline=true&s=i

the first five are free. The rest are between one and three dollars each. I just got the series, as I haven't read it in decades.

I actually built a Martian chessboard in high school, but could only get one other person to play it with me. Geeks were in short supply at my high school. :D

I was privileged to be able to spearhead Dark Horse Comics' launch of comics based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs' estate laid open the books for us, allowing us to publish comics featuring Tarzan, John Carter, Carson of Venus, and Pellucidar, but the two most incredible Burroughs projects that I edited were an uncompleted Tarzan novel that we serially published (the novel was finished by author Joe Lansdale) under the title Tarzan: The Lost Adventure, and an unpublished children's book manuscript that we discovered in the Burroughs archive, which we published as a hardcover volume entitled "Minidoka". One of the coolest things about Minidoka was that we also found a never-used painting by famed Tarzan artist J. Allen St. John for the cover!

After working on those projects, the rest of my time in comics was dross.