Otis Adelbert Kline

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Planet of Peril by Otis Adelbert Kline, Ace Books, 1963

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was 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 is best known for his purported novelistic feud with Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 1929, long before planetary romance became a conventional genre, he wrote Planet of Peril, a novel set on the planet Venus and written in the storytelling form of Burroughs's Martian novels. He followed this with two sequels. In response to Kline's "poaching" on his territory, Burroughs began writing his own Venus series. Kline's rejoinder was an even more direct intrusion, boldly setting two novels on Mars. He also wrote of white jungle adventurerers quite reminiscent of Burroughs's Tarzan.[1] However, the evidence of the feud itself is indirect, and the feud was not proposed to have existed until after both writers were dead. No comment from either writer acknowledging the feud is documented. Whether or not the feud actually existed or is merely a literary theory concocted after the fact is unknown.

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, pioneer sword and sorcery writer and creator of Conan the Barbarian). Kline represented Howard from the Spring of 1933 till Howard's death in June 1936, and continued to act as literay agent for Howard's estate thereafter.