The Land That Time Forgot

June 14, 1924: The Land That Time Forgot is published in hardcover by A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago.

The Land That Time Forgot
Cover art by J. Allen St. John for the A.C. McClurg first edition.

Previous magazine publication in The Blue Book in August, October and December, 1918

The original titles of the three parts were “The Lost U-Boat,” “Cor-Sva-Jo,” and “Out of Time’s Abyss.” Ray Long, editor of The Blue Book, didn’t care for the first two titles and came up with “The Land That Time Forgot” and “The People That Time Forgot.” The last part of the title, “… That Time Forgot,” has been used over and over ever since.

As writing began in September, 1917, Burroughs was greatly influenced by the massive propaganda against the Germans during World War One and the anti-German sentiments in the first section of the book were possibly stimulated by the torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915.

However, Burroughs was not a propagandist himself, he was more interested in writing an engaging story. He made heavily detailed notes with lists of characters, names of prehistoric beasts, descriptions of the various races, a drawing of a Galu woman with costume details, notes on Wieroos, a drawing their living quarters along with a scale drawing of the island of Caprona and the inner land of Caspak marked with the locations of the various races, forts and the Wieroo City of Human Skulls.

The trilogy depicts a peculiar and unique view of evolution that starts with the deposit of an egg in a pond and crawls its way up the phylogenic tree to end in either the metalworking human Galu or the monstrous cul-de-sac of the Wieroo, a race outside of human development lead by an ultra-conservative philosophy called Tas-ad which promotes conformity and murderous competition for status.

ERB left us no meditations about the theme of this tale, and, as usual, only considered it one of his “damphool” stories. It is left to us to sew its various motifs together and engage in the sport of attaching any kind of deeper statement to it. To Burroughs it was simply a way of feeding his family with what he considered was the only real gift he had, his wild imagination. In the process he left us one of his most exciting novels.