Virginia Maxon recognized her champion instantly as he who had fought for and saved her once before, from the hideous creature of her father's experiments. With hands tightly pressed against her bosom the girl leaned forward, tense with excitement, watching every move of the lithe, giant figure, as, silhouetted against the brazen tropic sky, it towered above the dancing, shrieking head hunters who writhed beneath the awful lash. Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the most iconic figures in American pop culture, Tarzan of the Apes, and it is impossible to overstate his influence on entire genres of popular literature in the decades after his enormously winning pulp novels stormed the public's imagination. In The Monster Men, first published in 1929, Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Moreau in Professor Maxon, who is striving, with all the mad-scientist passion he can muster, to create human life the hard way on a South Pacific island. Only his daughter, Virginia, knows that his latest creation, Number Thirteen, is more than a monster. American novelist EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (1875-1950) wrote dozens of adventure, crime, and science fiction novels that are still beloved today, including Tarzan of the Apes (1912), At the Earth's Core (1914), A Princess of Mars (1917), The Land That Time Forgot (1924), and Pirates of Venus (1934). He is reputed to have been reading a comic book when he died.