Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars

With an introduction by Junot Díaz

In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth—a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars’s weak gravity possesses the agility of a superman. He also wins the heart of fellow-prisoner Dejah Thoris, the alluring, red-skinned Princess of Helium, whose people he swears to defend against their grasping and ancient enemy, the city-state of Zodanga.

John Carter first appeared in 1912 in the pages of The All-Story magazine and immediately entered the dream-life of American readers young and old. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s favorite among his many creations and remains a favorite of lovers of science fiction and fantasy everywhere. On the occasion of John Carter’s centenary, The Library of America invites readers to rediscover A Princess of Mars, the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance.

Junot Díaz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the best-selling story collection Drown. He teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

*This volume features full-cloth case, Smyth-sewn binding, and acid-free paper but is not part of the Library of America series, and its design specifications differ from those of series titles.

Also by Edgar Rice Burroughs:
Tarzan of the Apes

Other titles of interest:
The Philip K. Dick Collection (boxed set)
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now (boxed set)

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