The Land that Time Forgot (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) »

While best known as the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote dozens of action-packed science-fiction novels. Perhaps his most acclaimed novel, The Land That Time Forgot takes readers from World War I naval battles to a mysterious island filled with ferocious prehistoric beasts and savage subhumans. While Burroughs's explanations for these strange phenomena are wildly fantastic, the focus is on survival, and as in most of his fiction, threats posed by nature and by dangerous foes test modern civilization. The result is a page-turning adventure with a scientific mystery at its core, a set of linked stories where, in the midst of fighting one danger after another, men become heroes and find love along the way.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had the kind of life that inspired the fantasies he eventually published to wild acclaim. In 1911, at age thirty-six, he sold his first story, A Princess of Mars, and the following year he published the first installment of Tarzan of the Apes. Burroughs was the first American writer to incorporate himself, and his estate in California, named Tarzana, eventually expanded to become a city. As a war correspondent during World War II, he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. When he died in 1950, he was one of the most commercially successful and critically scorned authors in America.