Edgar Rice Burroughs books are where American pulp adventure got its operating system. In one two-year burst a failed pencil-sharpener wholesaler in his late thirties invented the interplanetary romance with A Princess of Mars, the jungle superman with Tarzan of the Apes, and then kept inventing worlds, inside the Earth, on Venus, on the Moon, on lost islands where evolution runs sideways, for four more decades. Everything in the DNA of planetary adventure, from Flash Gordon through Star Wars to half the games industry, routes back through him.
This guide covers the Edgar Rice Burroughs books that matter now, with two honest framings up front. First, he was a velocity writer: the books are fast, formulaic, and shameless, and their pleasures are real exactly as far as you take them on those terms.
Second, the attitudes are period poison in places, and worse than period in others. Burroughs promoted eugenics and racial hierarchy in and out of his fiction, Tarzan carries that cargo openly, and this page names it where it matters instead of pretending the vines grow clean. The verdicts here are the critical consensus, not personal reads, and his slot in the genre’s story is covered on my best science fiction books list, with the space-opera lineage he seeded mapped on the space opera shelf.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read A Princess of Mars first, because Barsoom is the founding document of planetary romance and still the best fun in the catalog. Read At the Earth’s Core if the hollow-Earth pulp is your flavor, and The Land That Time Forgot for the best-built premise he ever had. Tarzan of the Apes is the famous one, read today as a cultural fossil with a motor in it. Everything else is for readers who already know they like the ride.
Edgar Rice Burroughs Books in Order
The essential series anchors and landmarks, by first serialization or book publication. The full catalog runs to some seventy titles across eleven Barsoom books, twenty-four Tarzans, seven Pellucidars, and the rest.
| Year | Title | Series | Notes |
| 1912 | A Princess of Mars | Barsoom | Serialized as Under the Moons of Mars |
| 1912 | Tarzan of the Apes | Tarzan | All-Story, October 1912 |
| 1913 | The Gods of Mars | Barsoom | |
| 1914 | The Warlord of Mars | Barsoom | Closes the trilogy |
| 1914 | At the Earth’s Core | Pellucidar | |
| 1914 | The Mucker | Standalone | |
| 1915 | Pellucidar | Pellucidar | |
| 1916 | Thuvia, Maid of Mars | Barsoom | |
| 1918 | The Land That Time Forgot | Caspak | Trilogy with its two sequels |
| 1922 | The Chessmen of Mars | Barsoom | |
| 1923 | The Moon Maid | Moon trilogy | Serialized 1923-1925 |
| 1927 | The Master Mind of Mars | Barsoom | |
| 1930 | Tanar of Pellucidar | Pellucidar | |
| 1930 | Tarzan at the Earth’s Core | Crossover | Tarzan meets Pellucidar |
| 1932 | Pirates of Venus | Amtor | |
| 1934 | Lost on Venus | Amtor | |
| 1939 | Synthetic Men of Mars | Barsoom | |
| 1948 | Llana of Gathol | Barsoom |
Where to Start With Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Princess of Mars, no contest. It is short, it moves like a landslide, and it is the template everything else repeats. If it works on you, Barsoom will keep working, and if it does not, nothing deeper in the catalog will change the verdict, because the catalog is this book at different addresses.
The one wrong door is starting with late Tarzan or late Barsoom, where the formula runs on fumes. Burroughs front-loaded his inventions, and the guide below is ordered accordingly.
Burroughs’s Life, Briefly
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, into comfort he spent two decades failing out of: a cavalry stint in Arizona, an unsuccessful gold dredge in Idaho, a battery factory, a railroad job he quit, and by his mid-thirties roughly seven years on low wages wholesaling pencil sharpeners. He started writing, by his own cheerful admission, because he read the pulps at work and decided he could do no worse.
He was right at scale. “Under the Moons of Mars” ran in The All-Story in 1912 under the name Norman Bean, earning him four hundred dollars, and Tarzan of the Apes followed in the same magazine that October. Within five years McClurg was issuing the serials as books, and within ten Burroughs had done something almost no author had: incorporated himself, as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., in 1923, eventually printing his own books and licensing Tarzan across every medium that existed. He bought a California ranch in 1919 and named it Tarzana, and when a community grew up around it, the town took the name. Few writers have ever been the landlord of their own brand so literally.
The last act was stranger than fiction: in Honolulu in his late sixties when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he talked his way into becoming one of the oldest American war correspondents of the Second World War. He died of a heart attack in Encino on March 19, 1950, at seventy-four, with a comic strip, a radio serial, and a film franchise still paying the company that bore his name.
The ledger has a dark column, and it belongs in any honest life: Burroughs was a vocal believer in eugenics and racial hierarchy, in essays as well as fiction, and books like Lost on Venus carry it into the open text. The entries below flag where that cargo sits heaviest.
The Barsoom Series
Eleven books about John Carter of Virginia, who falls asleep in an Arizona cave and wakes on a dying Mars of four-armed green warriors, canal cities, airships, and swordplay under two moons. It is the founding series of planetary romance, and its physics run on confidence alone.
A Princess of Mars (1912)
John Carter, Confederate veteran and professional fighting man, is translated to Mars without explanation and finds that lower gravity has made him a superman among the Tharks, the green nomads who capture him. Then he meets Dejah Thoris, princess of the red-skinned city of Helium, and the book locks onto the rails it never leaves: capture, escape, duel, rescue, repeat, at a pace that still embarrasses modern thrillers.
The consensus verdict after a century: this is the best of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books because the invention is at full pressure and the formula is still fresh paint. Barsoom itself is the star, a dying world whose savagery is explained by its drying seas, and the supporting monsters, the loyal ten-legged calot Woola above all, outlive the plot. The gender politics are 1912 pulp, the racial scheme of color-coded Martian peoples is exactly what it looks like, and the velocity is undiminished by either.
Read it with The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars, which complete the opening trilogy in one continuous arc, cliffhangers and all. Those two are the sale-unit’s natural continuation and need no separate argument: if Princess works, you will not stop.
The Chessmen of Mars (1922)
The Chessmen of Mars is the one later Barsoom book with a serious claim to being the series’ best single volume. Tara of Helium, Carter’s daughter, crash-lands among the kaldanes, bodiless heads that ride headless bodies like horses, one of the genuinely nightmarish inventions in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and the plot funnels into Manator, where the Martian chess game jetan is played with living pieces to the death.
It stands alone cleanly, the horror material gives it a charge the formula usually lacks, and Burroughs even appended the rules of jetan, which fans still play. Consensus rates it and the trilogy as the Barsoom peaks, with everything after Master Mind strictly for the committed. For a reader who wants one more Mars book past the trilogy, this is the one.
Pellucidar
At the Earth’s Core (1914)
David Innes and the inventor Abner Perry drill through the crust in a mechanical mole and break into Pellucidar, the world on the inside of the hollow Earth, lit by a tiny central sun under which it is always noon, where time refuses to behave and humans are prey. The masters of this inner world are the Mahars, telepathic winged reptiles who farm people, and the book is Burroughs’s purest monster-escape machine.
Pellucidar is the best of his settings after Barsoom precisely because it is the least chivalric: no courts, no princesses on thrones, just appetite all the way down. The sequel Pellucidar completes the founding pair, five more follow at declining pressure, and the 1930 crossover Tarzan at the Earth’s Core delivers exactly what its title promises, which is its own kind of integrity. Start here if hollow-Earth pulp is your flavor, and read the first two as one story.
The Tarzan Series
Twenty-four novels, beginning with Tarzan of the Apes (1912). The famous one.
Tarzan of the Apes gave him the most famous character he created, and after Sherlock Holmes arguably the most famous character anyone created in that half-century: the orphaned son of English nobility raised by the great apes, self-taught from his dead parents’ picture books, torn between the jungle and the drawing room. The first novel is a genuine myth-making machine, and its final third, Tarzan courteous and lethal among humans, still shows why the century could not put him down.
The honest reading names the machinery: the book is an aristocracy fable, blood will out, and its treatment of Black Africans is contempt written as scenery, fully consistent with the eugenic views Burroughs held openly. That is not a modern projection onto an innocent text, and it is why the character now lives more comfortably in adaptation than on the page. Read it as the foundational document it is, with The Return of Tarzan completing the arc, and treat the remaining twenty-two volumes as optional repetitions, of which Tarzan the Terrible is the fan pick.
The Lost Worlds and the Rest
The Land That Time Forgot (1918)
The Land That Time Forgot is the best premise Burroughs ever built: a German U-boat, hijacked twice over in the middle of the Great War, blunders into Caprona, an island continent where evolution is geography, life climbing from primordial soup in the south to near-men in the north as you travel. The war-weary frame gives it unusual grit for him, and the central mystery of Caspak’s biology is a genuine science-fictional idea, worked out across the full trilogy.
The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss complete the story, each from a new angle, and the three are one novel in three parts: buy the omnibus editions that print them together. Consensus treats Caspak as his most interesting invention after Barsoom, and the 1975 film adaptation kept the premise alive for another generation. For readers who want Burroughs with a thought experiment attached, this is the shelf.
The Moon Maid (1923)
The Moon Maid is his strangest structure, a future-history triptych serialized from 1923 to 1925, running from a voyage inside the hollow Moon, to the lunar Kalkars’ conquest of Earth, to a final volume of generations-long guerrilla war ending in the American wastelands. It is Burroughs doing Wells-scale pessimism in pulp dialect, written in open fury at Bolshevism, and the middle section’s occupied America is unlike anything else in his catalog.
Editions vary confusingly between The Moon Maid and The Moon Men configurations, and any complete three-part text serves. Consensus calls it the most interesting of the non-series Edgar Rice Burroughs books, a window into what the daydream machine produced when it was angry instead of sunny.
Pirates of Venus (1932)
Pirates of Venus opens the late-arriving fourth world: Carson Napier aims a rocket at Mars, botches the math, and crashes on cloud-wrapped Venus instead, a planet of mile-high trees, fish-ship pirates, and a civilization in hiding from its own revolution. The Amtor books are Barsoom at lower pressure with better jokes, Carson a klutz where Carter was a demigod, and the first two volumes are the fun ones.
The series also contains the catalog’s ugliest open statement: Lost on Venus detours through a eugenic utopia, sterilization and elimination of the “unfit” presented approvingly, which is Burroughs’s politics with the adventure varnish off. The honest recommendation is the first book for completists of his worlds, with eyes open from there. Among the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, Amtor is where charm and poison sit closest together.
The Mucker (1914)
The Mucker is the connoisseur’s deep cut and the proof he could work without a fantasy world at all. Billy Byrne, Chicago slum thug, mugger, and ball-player gone crooked, is shanghaied across an ocean of plot, shipwreck, a lost samurai island, prizefighting, Mexican revolution, and is slowly, grudgingly remade. It is pure picaresque, closer to London or Sabatini than to Barsoom, and Byrne’s climb from genuine viciousness gives it the only real character arc in the Burroughs catalog.
Fans have pushed it for a century as the secret best of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and the claim is defensible exactly because the formula has no planet to lean on. The sequel The Return of the Mucker exists and is skippable. For readers curious what the velocity reads like aimed at Earth, start here.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Deep Dive & FAQ
What Runs Through Burroughs’s Books
The first constant is the daydream, industrialized. Every Burroughs hero is an ordinary reader’s stand-in handed a world where his virtues are suddenly supreme, and the books repeat the wish with the shamelessness that is their engine. He wrote escape at a purity nobody has improved, which is why his fingerprints are on every franchise built since: the lineage from Barsoom runs through Flash Gordon and Superman to Star Wars and Avatar in a straight, documented line.
The second is worlds as machines for adventure. Barsoom’s dying ecology, Pellucidar’s eternal noon, Caspak’s evolutionary ladder: each setting is one strong idea arranged to generate chases forever. He built sandboxes before the word existed, which is why game designers keep rediscovering him.
The third is the politics in the gears. The hierarchies his plots reward, the color-coding of peoples, the eugenic daydreams surfacing in Venus and the Moon books: these are not blemishes on the machine but part of its design, from a writer who argued the ideas straight in essays. Reading him now means enjoying the velocity with both eyes open, and the two acts are compatible. That is this page’s whole method.
Honors and the Long Verdict
The pulps did not give awards, and the establishment of his era gave Burroughs nothing but sales, which he banked at a scale no genre writer had seen: self-incorporated in 1923, his own imprint by the 1930s, a town named for his trademark. The formal honors came to the heirs, Grand Master trophies for his descendants in spirit, while his own monument is infrastructure, a crater on Mars named Burroughs and a readership that never needed permission.
The long verdict splits clean: as a stylist he barely registers, as an engine of invention he is foundational, and the genre has stopped pretending the second depends on the first. Planetary romance is his patent, still in force.
Which Edgar Rice Burroughs Editions to Buy
The early books are public domain, so free texts abound and the money question is about good print. The current trade editions of A Princess of Mars run from mass-market omnibuses to annotated classics lines, and any complete text serves. For Barsoom the three-in-one trilogy omnibuses are the practical buy, and Caspak belongs in its single-volume trilogy editions. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. still issues authorized editions of the whole catalog, which is somehow the most Burroughs fact in this guide.
Collectors chase the McClurg firsts and the J. Allen St. John and Frank Frazetta cover eras, and a reader needs none of that: this is a catalog to consume in whatever printing is nearest, exactly as designed.
Burroughs on Screen
Tarzan is one of the most-filmed characters in cinema history, from the silents through Weissmuller’s definitive run to Disney’s 1999 animation and beyond, and the screen Tarzan, stripped of the books’ racial scaffolding, is the version the culture actually kept. The character’s screen afterlife is its own subject, and the books’ author profited from every frame through the company he built for exactly that purpose.
Mars fared worse: after a near-century of failed attempts, Disney’s John Carter (2012) arrived competent, oddly faithful, and commercially doomed, a flop so expensive it became the cautionary tale of its studio decade. The Land That Time Forgot got its charming 1975 Amicus adaptation, Pellucidar rode along in At the Earth’s Core (1976), and the definitive screen Barsoom still does not exist, which, given what the books are, may simply mean the movies already made it many times under other names.
Questions About Edgar Rice Burroughs
Where Should I Start With Edgar Rice Burroughs?
A Princess of Mars, with its two sequels queued. At the Earth’s Core if you want monsters over chivalry, The Land That Time Forgot if you want his best single premise.
What Order Should I Read the Barsoom Books In?
Publication order for the first three, which form one continuous trilogy. After that they stand alone: Chessmen of Mars is the strongest later volume, and completists run the full eleven.
Are the Tarzan Books Worth Reading Today?
The first one, as a foundational myth with its racial politics read honestly rather than excused. The screen Tarzan is the version the culture kept, and the later novels are formula for devotees.
How Many Books Did Burroughs Write?
Roughly seventy: eleven Barsoom, twenty-four Tarzan, seven Pellucidar, the Venus and Caspak and Moon series, plus westerns and standalones like The Mucker.
Was Burroughs Racist?
Yes, by the plain record: he promoted eugenics and racial hierarchy in fiction and essays, and books like Lost on Venus carry it explicitly. This page flags where it sits heaviest rather than sanding it off.
Why Did the John Carter Movie Fail?
Marketing and timing more than fidelity: the 2012 film was reasonably faithful and reasonably fun, cost a fortune, and landed a century after its source’s inventions had been strip-mined by everything from Flash Gordon to Avatar. Audiences saw imitations’ imitations first.
Did Burroughs Really Invent Planetary Romance?
A Princess of Mars in 1912 is the founding document, with debts to earlier Mars fiction the scholars enjoy tracing. What is not in dispute is the lineage downstream, which includes most of space opera’s furniture.
Where to go next
The planetary-romance line he founded runs forward through my space opera books list, and the pulp era’s other giants each have their page: the H. G. Wells guide for the questions Burroughs never asked, and the Jules Verne guide for the engineering he never checked. For where the daydream machine went literary, Ray Bradbury’s Mars answers Barsoom directly, and my Ray Bradbury books guide covers it.
