Otis Adelbert Kline 1891—1946

Otis Adelbert Kline born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, was an adventure novelist and literary agent during the pulp era. Much of his work first appeared in the magazine Weird Tales. He 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 (Planet of Peril and two sequels) 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. (source: Wikipedia)