Hulbert had continued to investigate both business and personal records of his father, and had discussed the question with other members of the Burroughs family. The story which was pieced together is this:

In 1940 the Whitman Publishing Company, which had published children's adaptations of a number of Tarzan stories with great success, asked ERB for a "Big Little Book" featuring John Carter. The Big Little Books were a children's series following an extremely rigid format: stories had to be 15,000 words in length, and so constructed that they could be published with alternating pages of text and drawings, each picture illustrating the action depicted on the facing page of text.

Edgar Rice Burroughs felt uncomfortable writing to the strict formula of this series, and so he asked his son John Coleman Burroughs, who was also the illustrator of the book, to collaborate with him in producing the story. The result was a tale, essentially similar to John Carter and the Giant of Mars, which appeared under the Whitman impress with the same title as the present volume: JOHN CARTER OF MARS.

At the same time, Ray Palmer of AMAZING STORIES was seeking a new Barsoomian adventure from ERB, to feature in his magazine. Taking the as-yet unpublished collaboration as his basis, Edgar Rice Burroughs lengthened it by some 5000 words and adapted it "upward" for adult readership, producing finally John Carter and the Giant of Mars.

The longer version appeared in AMAZING and the shorter one in the Whitman book. The text used in the present volume is the AMAZING version.

Skeleton Men of

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