Into the World of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with Richard A. Lupoff and John Flint Roy
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Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure by Richard A. Lupoff (Ace, 1968) and A Guide to Barsoom
by John Flint Roy (Ballantine Books, January 1976). Covers by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo
Among my prized possessions are these two books. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure, by Richard A. Lupoff, 1965 from Ace books with an early cover by Frazetta, and A Guide to Barsoom by John Flint Roy, 1976, from Ballantine Books, with a cover by Boris Vallejo and some interior illustrations by Neal MacDonald.
Lupoff’s book has quite a bit of biographical material on ERB, but is mostly an examination of his work. It isn’t just a love affair with ERB but includes plenty of critical analysis. I find myself disagreeing with Lupoff on one particular conclusion he draws, but that’s material for another post. I much appreciated this comprehensive examination and refer to it often.
[Click the images for Tarzan-sized versions.]
Back covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure and A Guide to Barsoom
Flint Roy’s book is just a delight. It remains the most comprehensive encyclopedia of Barsoom and everything about it, and does include some brief biographical materials at the end. It’s a very handy guide that I also keep within easy reach.
Both of these have been rereleased in later editions, which I don’t own, and they don’t have covers by these two masters.
I know there are other biographies of ERB available, Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, by John Taliaferro; and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan: A Biography, by Robert W. Fenton but I haven’t read either of them. Does anyone know if they’re any good?
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.
The Burroughs bibliography I cut my teeth on was Irwin Porges’s Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Brigham University Press, 1975). A huge hardbound book, both in dimensions (basically an extremely thick coffee table book) and pages (well over 800 of the latter). It was, I believe, the first serious and comprehensive attempt at a treatment of the man’s life. I don’t recall a lot about the content at this remove, but it covered its subject adequately, though I believe it was authorized by the Burroughs estate and so likely somewhat sanitized. Which was okay for me, as I was in my mid-teens at the time. Could never have afforded this monster; my parents, knowing I was a Burroughs fiend, got it for me as a Christmas gift. What I do recall is it was lavishly illustrated, and included lots of goodies like ERB’s manuscript maps of his various worlds and Tarzan’s lost race/city locales. In the decades since there have been any number of newer bios; the 1990s, as I recall, were especially fruitful of such. I may have one or two of them, but none made as much of an impression on my as the Porges had. Anyway, I had long since exhausted ERB’s extensive backlist of fiction by then and moved on to other authors–and I still had that monster volume if I needed to look up any stray facts. I did, though, continue to collect and delve into various guides to his works. I have both the original and revised editions of the Lupoff, and the original version of the Roy, for instance.
Brian, at the time I wrote this, which was quite a bit ago, I had not heard of Porges, but I’ve since gotten a copy. I’ve scanned some bits of it but haven’t settled in for a long read, and it is indeed quite a massive book as you noted. I’m looking forward to getting to study it, hopefully in the next year or so.
These are awesome! Wish I had them.
We need more books like these about the authors BLACKGATE readers are into.
I’m working on one myself about Sword and Planet stuff but haven’t had time to focus on getting it into shape.
For many years I had the Ace paperback of Master of Adventure that you picture here. I read it almost literally to pieces; now I have the 2005 Bison (University of Nebraska Press) edition, and it’s well worth getting even if your old Ace is still in good shape. It’s a beautiful oversized paperback with plenty of extras: a nice forward by Michael Moorcock, several interior illustrations (Frazetta, Al Williamson, Reed Crandall) and a thirty-five page long extra chapter covering ERB’s reputation and publishing history in the 40 years since the original edition.
I had a look for that version recently and it was hard to find. I’ll have to check again. I’d like to have it