John Carter of Mars is the eleventh and final book in the Barsoom series by
Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is not actually a novel but rather a collection of two
John Carter of Mars stories.
The first, "John Carter and the Giant of Mars", is a juvenile story penned by
Burrough's son John "Jack" Coleman Burroughs, and claimed to have been revised
by Burroughs. It was written for a Whitman Big Little Book, illustrated by Jack
Burroughs that was published in 1940 and then republished in Amazing Stories
the next year.
The second story, "Skeleton Men of Jupiter", was first published in Amazing
Stories in 1943. Intended as the first in a series of novelettes to be later
collected in book form, in the fashion of Llana of Gathol, it ends with the
plot unresolved, and the intended sequels were never written. Several other
writers have written pastiche endings for the story.
The first edition of John Carter of Mars (a title that Burroughs never
actually used for any book in the Barsoom series) was published in 1964 by
Canaveral Press, fourteen years after Burrough's death.