Next year brings the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first two published novels: A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, as well as a big-budget film version of A Princess of Mars from Disney. (The film is saddled with the unfortunately bland title of John Carter. Fear of a Red Planet?) The effect these novels had on popular cultural cannot immense: they created a whole medium, they altered the nature of reading for pleasure. Pulp magazines already existed before Edgar Rice Burroughs had the idea he could write better than the tripe found in the publications where he was working to place ads. But it was the success of first Under the Moons of Mars (the serial title for A Princess of Mars) and then Tarzan of the Apes that made the pulps into the artillery of the Reader Revolution. The pulps made the U.S. into a nation of readers...