ERBzine 0036: Otis Adelbert Kline I (original) (raw)

Otis Adelbert Kline Features by Den Valdron

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1. OAK Mini-Bios

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The creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was, without a doubt, the most famous author of fantasy-adventure. Though his imitators were legion, only one man was able to compete successfully with Burroughs. He was Otis Adelbert Kline.

Though they wrote for the same publishers and filmed by the same movie studios, Kline never meant to compete with Burroughs. He admired the author, and it was his enthusiasm for that type of story that inspired him to create his own universe of planets of peril, peopled by swashbuckling planeteers and stimulating sirens.

En garde! You have in hand The Swordsman of Mars. This is not the science-fiction of computers and analogs. There will be no roar of rockets. This is for the reader who wants a free-fall flight in fantastic adventure with star-flung heroes fighting furiously for honor on worlds without it, and beautiful maidens who know there is a fate worse than death! This is for the reader who likes his thrills unique, and his fiction spellbinding from first page to last.

Touche? Then Otis Adelbert Kline is your meat! The only author to be compared with Edgar Rice Burroughs, but whose work is as original as Burroughs' own!

-- Vernell Coriell - Founder, The Burroughs Bibliophiles
from the introduction to ACE edition Swordsman of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Barsoom, has never had a peer. He stands unsurpassed as a master of fantasy-adventure, and so it shall always be.

Yet there was one who came so close that many consider him to have equaled the old master himself. He was Otis Adelbert Kline, a superb fantasy author, and creator of Jan of the Jungle and Grandon of Terra, the Prince of Peril.

Surely Kline and Burroughs had much in common. They both wrote because they loved to write, they wrote the same type of stories for more or less the same magazines, and they probably influenced each other greatly.

In 1933, Kline introduced the readers of Argosy to Jerry Morgan, the swashbuckling hero of The Outlaws of Mars and it was an instant success. "Excitement, vivid imagination, and strong human conflicts make up this full-length fantastic novel of an Earthman's adventures on the Red Planet." So said the editors then and now, nearly thirty years later, their description is still valid.
-- Camille Cazedessus, Jr.
-- Editor, ERB-dom Magazine
In the introduction for the ACE edition of the Outlaws of Mars