A magazine writer’s breakthrough
Burroughs was born in Chicago and graduated from Michigan Military Academy. An attempt to enter West Point failed, and he enlisted in the United States cavalry, serving in Arizona. Several kinds of work and business followed before writing offered a more dependable livelihood. In 1911 he submitted part of a novel to The All-Story.
That story appeared in 1912 as Under the Moons of Mars, under the printed name Norman Bean. Tarzan of the Apes followed in the same magazine that year. The two characters became the centres of continuing adventures and a career that extended into book publication and adaptations in other media. The first Mars story reached hardcover in 1917 as A Princess of Mars.
A traveller and an inherited manuscript
The novel’s foreword presents John Carter’s account as a manuscript inherited from a relative. Carter then takes over the narration, anticipating disbelief and asserting the truth of his extraordinary experiences. This is the fiction’s frame, not evidence of an actual traveller to Mars. The remembered Virginia household also carries the racial assumptions of the narrator’s world.
The Grosset & Dunlap reprint held here credits illustrations to Frank E. Schoonover. His pictures give bodies and scale to a narrative that repeatedly asks its audience to imagine unfamiliar forms of life. The artist’s contribution belongs beside Burroughs’s writing, while the reprint’s identity remains separate from the original magazine serial and first hardcover edition.
