A Princess of Mars: A Library of America Special Publication [Hardcover]

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 sixlimbed, 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 ofThe All-Storymagazine 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 rediscoverA Princess of Mars, the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance.

Junot Díaz’s fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker,The Paris Review, andThe Best American Short Stories. His highly-anticipated first novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was greeted with rapturous reviews, including Michiko Kakutani inThe New York Timescalling it “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.” His debut story collection,Drown, published eleven years prior toOscar Wao, was also met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, DíalÓ'