Born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 1, 1875, into a well-to-do family, Edgar Rice Burroughs was given an aristocratic private education. But though he tried his hand at several business ventures, he was drawn more to an itinerant life of adventure than to a life in the boardroom.
In 1912, after many failed business ventures, the thirty-five-year-old Burroughs published his first story, “Under the Moons of Mars,” in the pulp magazine All-Story. It was so successful that he turned soon thereafter to writing full-time. He would write nearly 70 novels and numerous short stories before his death in 1950. Although best-known for his immensely popular Tarzan series—he later bought an estate near where the films were shot in Southern California that he named Tarzana—Burroughs didn’t confine himself to a single genre, also writing medieval romances, westerns, and mainstream novels.
Among his many science-fiction works, Burroughs wrote eleven novels in the John Carter of Mars series, the titular final installment of which was published fourteen years after his death in 1950.
Mike Ashley is a full time writer and researcher with nearly a hundred books to his credit. These cover such diverse titles as The Seven Wonders of the World, British Kings and Queens, The Mammoth Book of King Arthur, Incredible Monsters and the biography of Algernon Blackwood, Starlight Man. He has also written a four-volume history of the science-fiction magazines and a book about the British popular fiction magazines The Age of the Story-tellers. He lives in Kent, England with his wife and three cats, and when time allows likes to go for long walks.
