Pulp Magazine Authors and Literature Fans discussion

Many members of this group (including yours truly!) are fans of the voluminous work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So, a recent online interview with Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (who's a Burroughs fan), dealing with ERB's Martian series, might be of interest. He was interviewed by fellow author Richard A. Lupoff for an e-zine devoted to Burroughs, and the link is:
http://www.erbzine.com/mag30/3047.html . Also, another e-zine, The Cimmerian (which covers older pulp speculative fiction in general) posted a detailed summary of and response to this interview, at: http://www.thecimmerian.com/?p=12255 .

A big thanks to our founding moderator, Steven Harbin, for making me aware of these articles via Facebook! I haven't had a chance to read either one all the way through yet; but judging from the bits I read so far, they're both really interesting.

ERB was huge for adventure writing. Tarzan and John Carter of Mars were favorites of course, but I also liked his stand-alone, The Outlaw of Torn.

The Outlaw of Torn is one of my favorites also. I believe it was the 3rd or 4th book Burroughs wrote, shortly after Tarzan of the Apes.

Oh, and thanks for the kind words Werner!

Thanks, Werner. I got to read the article in the Cimmerian, but erbzine.com is down right now, I guess. I'll try to pick it up later. Very interesting, although I don't consider them such minor quibbles.

I read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he always told a good tale. Actually, though I do like Sf and read the "Mars" series, I regard Tarzan as his best creation.

Has anyone here read Fritz Leiber's Tarzan novel, Tarzan and The Valley of Gold? I'm rereading it currently. Although based on a movie script, it was approved by the Burroughs estate after he submitted a sample chapter and added as number twenty-five in the series. So well done, it could have been written by Burroughs, but also had Leiber's style.

Yes, I have. It was enjoyable also.

There are also some "unauthorized" Tarzan books out there not approved by the Burroughs estate. Most are pretty average.

You're probably talking about the five Barton Werper novels. I own a set, bought out of curiosity, but when I got them, they looked pretty crappy, so I never read them.

Randy: YOu might want to read one just out of curiousity. But Barton Werper was not half the storyteller Burroughs was.

I find Burroughs a fine writer and a great storyteller.

Recently, I finished reading Burroughs' The Bandit of Hell's Bend, and really liked it! For what it's worth, I'd say it might be his best work (and I'm not usually an ardent Western fan, as such!). Here, unlike in his Tarzan novels and his SF, he was writing about a milieu that he actually knew (as a youth, he worked as a cowboy in the 19th-century West, on his brother's Idaho ranch), and this shows. I've read one of Zane Grey's Westerns, and genuinely liked this one better; I don't think Burroughs gets enough critical credit for his work in this genre.

After Werner recommended that book to me, I found I didn't have it, so looked it up on Project Gutenberg. They have over 100 of ERB's books for free there, including that one. I found almost 150 of REH's.

Would people like a separate Edgar Rice Burroughs Goodreads group, do you think? Thoughts?

Here is the ERB group at Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Edgar-R...

Even though ERB is one of my favorite authors, I feel like I'd be over-extended if I join another discussion group; I'm trying to hold my total to 15. (Okay, I'm up to 18; but Goodreads Librarians and Goodreads Feedback don't really count as discussion groups, and one of the others will probably soon be deleted. :-) ) But I think he's popular enough that there would be a lot of people who'd join such a group --actually, I'm surprised there's not one already! Have you checked?

I did a cursory check and couldn't find one. I'm still new to Goodreads, maybe I ought to gave a look at other author-specific groups to see how they're best done.

Why not just make a folder in this group for him & list his series & stand alone books?