Otis Adelbert 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, in which appeared the infamous story “The Loved Dead” (which we ran last week). In the mid-1930s Kline largely abandoned writing to concentrate on his career as a literary agent, most famously for fellow Weird Tales author Robert E. Howard, who has appeared here at Escape Artists several times.

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 in 1936, “The Kline-Burroughs War,” by Donald A. Wollheim. In 1963, it was given wider circulation by Sam Moskowitz in his book Explorers of the Infinite. Richard A. Lupoff debunked the case in 1965 in his book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. Among the evidence cited by Lupoff discounting the feud: (1) no comment from either writer acknowledging the feud is documented, and (2) family members of the two authors have no recollection of ever hearing them mention it.