Today (September 1) is the birthday of two literary giants, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) and Harold Lamb (1892-1962).

First, Burroughs changed not just the landscape of fantastic literature, but that of popular literature and popular culture in general.

While Tarzan may be his most well-known character, Burroughs had a vivid imagination that wasn’t restricted to an imaginary Africa.  His imagination soared across the vacuum of space to Barsoom Venus and to the Earth’s interior to Pellucidar just to name three other series.  He also wrote a number of other novels not set in any series.

Burroughs gets a lot of flak from certain quarters these days because he wasn’t enlightened enough to hold views that would be seen as proper over half a century after his death.  I don’t care.  He wrote great stories.  In the end, that’s the thing that most matters to a writer, writing books and stories that readers will enjoy and will still be reading long after his death.

Our other birthday boy is Harold Lamb.  Lamb wrote little that was overtly fantastic, but his influence is still felt.  He casts a long shadow over the genre.  Lamb was an expert on central Asian history and authored a number of works of both fiction and nonfiction that were highly regarded at the time of their publications.  He also served as a consultant for the State Department at times. Lamb has faded from public consciousness, but his influence is there if you know what to look for.  Compare the structure of some of his Khlit the Cossack stories and Robert E. Howard’s Conan.  The first time I read Lamb it felt like I was reading Howard.  Personally, I would like to thank Howard Andrew Jones for bringing Lamb back into print with the Bison collections.  They are an essential component of any fan of the fantastic’s library.  Not because the stories are fantasy, but because Lamb could create a world with his words that was factually-based and yet more exotic than nearly anything published under the labels of science fiction and fantasy.

I came late to Burroughs and Lamb, as well as Haggard and Merritt and Sabatini.  I was aware of them and their influence, but I was too busy trying to keep up with new writers to get around to reading them.  That has changed over the last few years.  There are a few new writers who I will read, but for the most part, the people getting all the hype, at least from legacy publishing, just don’t measure up.  Too much of the new work is preachy, and what isn’t is often just plain dull.  And anyone who is too stupid to know the difference between Joseph Campbell and John W. Campbell isn’t worth my time.  (If you don’t get the reference, you haven’t missed anything.)  I have no idea how many years I have left, but I would rather spend them visiting Barsoom, sailing with pirates, riding across the steppes, finding lost civilizations, or visiting darkest Africa than being preached to.

I tend to limit these birthday posts to writers and artists who are no longer with us except through their works, but I would like to mention three authors who are currently active whose works I have enjoyed (YMMV).  They are C. J . Cherryh (b. 1942), Timothy Zahn (b. 1951), and S. Andrew Swann (b. 1966).