Otis Adelbert Kline


Otis Adelbert Kline born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, was a songwriter, an adventure novelist and literary agent during the pulp era. Much of his work first appeared in the magazine Weird Tales. Kline was an amateur orientalist and a student of Arabic, like his friend and sometime collaborator, E. Hoffmann Price.

Kline and Burroughs

Kline is best known for an apocryphal literary feud with fellow author Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which he supposedly raised the latter's ire by producing close imitations of Burroughs's Martian novels, though set on Venus; Burroughs, the story goes, then retaliated by writing his own Venus novels, whereupon Kline responded with an even more direct intrusion on Burroughs's territory by boldly setting two novels on Mars. Kline's jungle adventure stories, reminiscent of Burroughs's Tarzan tales, have also been cited as evidence of the conflict. While the two authors did write the works in question, the theory that they did so in contention with each other is supported only circumstantially, by the resemblance and publication dates of the works themselves. The feud theory was originally set forth in a fan press article, "The Kline-Burroughs War," by Donald A. Wollheim, and afterward given wider circulation by Sam Moskowitz in his book Explorers of the Infinite. Richard A. Lupoff debunked the case in his book . Among the evidence cited by Lupoff discounting the feud: no comment from either writer acknowledging the feud is documented, and family members of the two authors have no recollection of ever hearing them mention it. In response to Lupoff's investigations Moskowitz identified his original source as Wollheim's article, while Wollheim stated, when questioned on the source of his own information: "I made it up!"

Kline and ''Weird Tales''

Kline was an assistant editor at Weird Tales from its inception. He contributed numerous stories to the magazine and edited a single issue — that for May-July 1924.

Literary agent

In the mid-1930s Kline largely abandoned writing to concentrate on his career as a literary agent. Kline represented Howard from the spring of 1933 till Howard's death in June 1936, and continued to act as literary agent for Howard's estate thereafter. It has been suggested that Kline may have completed Howard's "planetary romance" Almuric, which he submitted to Weird Tales for posthumous publication in 1939, although this claim is disputed.

Venus series

  1. The Planet of Peril
  2. The Prince of Peril
  3. The Port of Peril

    Mars series

  4. The Swordsman of Mars
  5. The Outlaws of Mars

    Jan of the Jungle

  6. The Call of the Savage, or Jan of the Jungle
  7. Jan in India
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Other novels and stories