“John Carter and the Giant of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Coleman Burroughs

Thanks to a recent post by Free SF Reader and the copyright laws of Australia, we’re reading our way through “John Carter and the Giant of Mars,” a story written in the early 1940s by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) in collaboration with his youngest son, John Coleman Burroughs (1913-1979), at Project Gutenberg of Australia.

As both ERBList.com and Wikipedia point out, the story has a fascinating but confusing publishing history, and since we’re not sure whether the approximately 17,600-word piece at Project Gutenberg of Australia is the juvenile story that was first published as a Whitman Big Little Book (1940), or the later expansion that appeared in Amazing Stories magazine (1941), we’ll let you figure it out!

On a more serious note, Danton Burroughs (1944-2008), grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Chairman of the Board of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., died earlier this year at age 63.