John Harwood: Pioneer ERB Fanzine Writer
by Alan Hanson
John Harwood was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts,
in 1914. Had he been born 50 years earlier he might have been raised on
the stories of crusty, old sailors, and eventually have gone to sea himself
as many young men of previous generations had done in that old whaling
city. By the time John Harwood came along, though, the whaling industry
had disappeared, and there were no sailors to tell their stories to eager
young boys. Instead, at an early age, John discovered the stories of Edgar
Rice Burroughs, and his youthful imagination regularly carried him away
to Tarzan’s Africa and John Carter’s Mars. Instead of going to sea, John
Harwood went to work in New Bedford’s textile mills, and there he worked
his whole life. He never lost his youthful love for the stories of Edgar
Rice Burroughs, though, and that love became a life-long avocation. He
was there when ERB fandom first organized, and, in my opinion, became the
foremost ERB fanzine writer of his generation.
I became familiar with the name of John Harwood soon after
joining The Burroughs Bibliophiles in the mid-1960s. By then Harwood
was among a small coterie of writers who regularly filled Vern Coriell’s
Burroughs Bulletin with articles of a quality arguably unmatched in
ERB fanzines before or since. Among his writing cohorts was Allan Howard
of Newark, New Jersey, who wrote entertaining features on a wide variety
of subjects. Maurice B. Gardner of Portland, Maine, was Vern’s book and
movie reviewer. ERB pastiche fiction was the specialty of Bill Gilmour
of Jessup, Pennsylvania. Frank J. Brueckel of Los Angeles, an astronomer
by trade, authored long scientific treatises analyzing ERB’s various worlds.
When it came to writing about themes in ERB stories, however,
no one could match John Harwood’s depth of knowledge and use of detail.
As a new Burroughs fan as a teenager, I remember being amazed at the exhaustive
scope of a Harwood article. As just one example, consider his article,
“Who Says They Weren’t Married?” It appeared in a 1962 issue of
The
Gridley Wave. In it Harwood addressed the rumor that Tarzan books had
been removed from the shelves of an elementary school library in Downey,
California, supposedly because Tarzan and Jane weren’t married. In the
article, Harwood dismissed the incident outright as media hype. Nevertheless,
he went on to provide all the evidence anyone would ever want, and more,
that Tarzan and his mate were indeed married. In addition to citing the
wedding ceremony in The Return of Tarzan, Harwood identified
over 500 other passages in the Tarzan books that indicated Tarzan and Jane
were married. He even pointed out that Jane is referred to as Lady Greystoke
exactly 157 times in ERB’s Tarzan stories.
A Commitment to Detail
It was a commitment to exact and complete detail that
separated John Harwood from all other fanzine writers of his time. When
it came to knowledge of Burroughs’ works, the only other fanzine writer
of the 1960s and 1970s who could compete with Harwood was the great John
F. Roy. Aside from differences in writing style, though, Roy did not have
the passion for detail in his articles that Harwood did. Roy typically
identified conditions and patterns in ERB’s stories and then was content
with giving a few examples to support his argument. As an example, take
Roy’s article, “Tarzan Is Not for the Birds” in a 1963 issue of
ERB-dom. In it Roy mentioned that he had wondered about the role of birds
in ERB’s fiction, and so he reread the first 12 Tarzan books and took notes,
on which he based his article. John Harwood, on the other hand, would never
have been satisfied with having read just half of the Tarzan series. He
needed to have every applicable reference in the entire series on hand
before he put pen to paper. For example, read the opening paragraph of
Harwood’s article, “The Ambidextrous Ape-Man” in ERB-dom #67 in
1973.
“In ERB’s jungle detective story, ‘Tarzan and the
Jungle Murders,’ he has the ape-man solve a murder by bringing out
the fact that the murderer was a left-handed man. That made me wonder,
was ERB’s Tarzan right-handed or left? So I reread the original Tarzan
series, all 26 first editions.”
Just what kind of man could be so fascinated with ERB’s
stories that he would sit down and read 26 books, all of which he had read
many times before, just so that he could answer one simple question? Since
John Harwood’s work provided inspiration for my own meager fanzine writing
efforts, I often wondered just what kind of person he was. Therefore, when
I went to the Dum-Dum in Woodland Hills, California, in the summer
of 1996, finding out more information about John Harwood was on my list
of things to do. To my surprise, though, Burroughs Bibliophiles President
Bob Hyde told me he had never met John Harwood, this despite the fact that
they were both charter members of the bibliophiles. Pete Ogden, who printed
many Harwood articles in ERBANIA, knew him only through correspondence.
Bob Barrett, another active fan back in that era, also could tell me nothing
about John Harwood. For some unknown reason, it turns out that Harwood
did not attend the annual meetings of The Burroughs Bibliophiles. Perhaps
he was not financially able to do so, or perhaps he was a shy man who would
have felt uncomfortable at a Dum-Dum. Whatever the reason, I was unable
to find anyone who knew John Harwood personally.
A Private Life for a Public
Fan
What very little that is known of John Harwood’s personal
life, then, comes from an autobiographical sketch printed in The Gridley
Wave #3 in June 1961. From it we know that Harwood was born and raised
and lived his entire life in New Bedford. There are very few other revelations
of a personal nature in the article, which dwells with Harwood’s relationship
with ERB’s books and fandom. For instance, there is no mention of a wife
or family. In his correspondence with them, neither Bob Hyde nor Pete Ogden
could recall John making any reference to an immediate family, and so that
part of his life is a mystery.
Harwood explained, however, that it was through a couple
of relatives that he first discovered the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
“Edgar Rice Burroughs had written his first novel,
UNDER
THE MOONS OF MARS, and had it published in the ALL-STORY MAGAZINE in
the year before I was born. However, it wasn’t until 1922, when I was eight
years old, that I read my first book by the author. A cousin had received
a copy of THE SON OF TARZAN for a Christmas present a couple of
days before my birthday and it wasn’t until after the first of the year
that he had finished it up and let me read it. Up to that time, I had thought
Tom Swift and his various inventions was the tops in reading entertainment.
I changed my mind and thought I had discovered and even greater hero than
the young inventor after reading my first Tarzan book. Later I found out
that another cousin owned four more of the Tarzan books (TARZAN OF THE
APES, TARZAN AND THE JEWELS OF OPAR, TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, and TARZAN
AND THE GOLDEN LION.) When my cousins outgrew their interest in Tarzan
they turned the books over to me, thus making a start to my collection.”
A few years later, the young John Harwood discovered that
Burroughs wrote other kinds of books besides Tarzan. The Martian books
especially fascinated him with all their swordplay, which reminded him
of the Douglas Fairbanks movies he was seeing at the time. For the next
20 years, Harwood read Burroughs’ books as they were published in book
form. He bought one first edition of each title. Those same first editions
he used as his reading copies of the books throughout his years of research
and writing for the ERB fanzines. Whenever Harwood wanted to point out
a specific passage in a Burroughs book, he made reference to the page number
in the “first edition” of the book. The bookshelf of John Harwood held
no multiple editions of Burroughs’ books. In the 1961 sketch, he explained
why.
“My collection of books consists of only one copy of
each title plus a few of the unpublished magazine stories. My interest
in the hobby lies more in the contents of the books than in the books themselves.
Thus, if I had half a dozen copies of TARZAN OF THE APES in its
different editions and wanted to look up the details of Tarzan’s fight
with Kerchak, I would need only one book to do any research.”
ERB Fanzines Became His
Forum
It was through his job in one of the New Bedford textile
mills that Harwood first learned that there were other Burroughs fans like
him around the country. A fellow worker gave him some back issues of certain
science fiction magazines. In the readers’ column of one issue in 1947,
John saw a letter referring to several Burroughs stories that had never
appeared in book form. When John wrote to the author asking for more details,
he received a long, friendly letter in return. That was how John first
came to know Vernell Coriell. It was Vern who soon thereafter provided
the encouragement and the forum needed for John to become a fanzine writer.
“In one of his first letters, Vern told me that he
had been thinking of starting a fanzine to be devoted to the subject of
ERB and his works. He wanted my opinion on the subject. I replied that
it sounded like an excellent idea but didn’t think that he could gather
enough material to keep up publication for any length of time. In his next
letter he stated that if fans send in enough articles on various phases
of ERB’s life and works he might succeed. He asked me to expand some of
the ideas I had mentioned in one of my letters into an article. I wrote
an article which I entitled THE UNWRITTEN STORIES OF ERB and sent it to
him. That is how I started writing for the fanzines.”
That first article appeared in The Burroughs Bulletin
#4, dated October 1947, but it was not the first time John Harwood’s
name had appeared in the Bulletin. Two months earlier, Harwood had supplied
a “Tarzan Quiz” for Burroughs Bulletin #2. For the next 27 years,
Harwood’s articles and letters were a constant presence in Burroughs fanzines.
While his work was most often seen in Vern’s publications, through the
years he contributed to many other fanzines, including Barsoomian, ERBANIA,
Erbivore, and ERB-dom. Personally, I have never seen a copy of Norb’s Notes,
but in a 1962 issue of The Gridley Wave, Vern wrote that Norb’s
Notes was “of interest to ERB fans due to the efforts of Maurice B. Gardner
and John Harwood, who appear in almost every issue.”
Correspondence with ERB
About the time John Harwood started writing for The Burroughs
Bulletin, he is known to have corresponded with Edgar Rice Burroughs at
least once. Harwood described that communication in Jasoomian #7 in
1972.
“The mention of the (NATIONAL) GEOGRAPHICS brings to
mind a letter I had from him (ERB) one time. I’ve tried to find the letter
in recent years but with no luck so I can’t quote his exact words. Back
in the late 1940s I wrote to him suggesting that he do a story laid back
in the whaling days and mentioning New Bedford as the starting point of
the voyage. I thought he might show some whaling scenes, the hero swallowed
up by a whale, and recovered, the whale ship attacked and sunk by an enraged
whale, the survivors taking to the whale boats, one of the boats attacked
by a giant Octopus or squid, and finally the men reaching dry land. Then
they would find themselves on an island full of wild beasts and savages.
Then would come a series of regular ERB adventures with the hero using
a harpoon in place of a spear like Tarzan. With my letter, I sent ERB a
couple of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICS with articles about whales, octopuses, and
squids for background material. ERB returned the magazines with a letter
stating that he would be glad to mention New Bedford in a story but that
he wasn’t well and didn’t think that he would be doing anymore writing.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs may not have been impressed with
Harwood’s story idea, but he certainly was impressed with Harwood’s articles
on his stories. Vern Coriell reported that after reading John’s stories
in The Burroughs Bulletin, Burroughs commented, “I am amazed at the
knowledge John Harwood has of my stories. As a matter of fact, he knows
more about them than I do.”
Charter Member of The
Burroughs Bibliophiles
A decade after Burroughs passed away, Vern Coriell finally
pressed forward with the formation of The Burroughs Bibliophiles. John
Harwood was involved with the formation of that group, as Vern explained
in The Gridley Wave #3.
“Not long after I published the first issue of THE
BURROUGHS BULLETIN, I began to consider the possibility of organizing a
Burroughs fan club. The idea was discussed at various times with fans like
Al Howard, Stan Vinson, John Harwood, Maurice Gardner, Forry Ackerman and
others. All agreed that there was need for such an organization.”
Harwood was not among the 30 or so fans who met and officially
formed The Burroughs Bibliophiles in Pittsburgh on September 4, 1960. However,
according to Bob Hyde, who presided at that organizational meeting, Vern
decided that those Burroughs fans with whom he had discussed the formation
of the club would also be considered charter members, even though they
did not attend the meeting. John Harwood, then, was among the original
members of The Burroughs Bibliophiles. Vern designated him member #25.
A Simple Question &
Answer Style
Although John Harwood had a commitment to thoroughness
and detail in his articles, his writing style was rather simple. The typical
Harwood article was built around questions. Very early in an article, he
would pose a question, and then proceed to answer it. For example, Harwood
opened his article about Opar, “The City of Unseen Eyes” (BB
#13, 1962), by asking, “What do we know about the history and location
of this abode of evil?” He then went on to outline what ERB revealed
about Oparian history and to place it upon the map using the hints that
Burroughs provided. Throughout the article, other questions were asked
and answered in turn. “How did Opar originate and why did it finally
become a city of ruined buildings and degenerate humans?” “What
does Tarzan do with all this wealth?” “What happened to all the
other cities in this African empire of the motherland?” “How is
it possible that the two sexes of a single race can be so dissimilar?”
The repeated asking and answering of questions, then,
was the most conspicuous component of John Harwood’s writing style. The
questions he asked in articles were undoubtedly the same ones that came
to him while reading a Burroughs story, providing the inspiration for the
article in the first place. It is, perhaps, not the most creative of writing
styles, but the reader of a John Harwood article always knew where the
author was headed. The use of questions to structure his writing decreased
somewhat through the years, but never completely disappeared.
In a couple of articles toward the end of his fanzine-writing
career, Harwood used an interesting variation of his question-and-answer
style. In his “Fantastic Fencing Folios” (BB #19, 1970),
Harwood opened up with his typical questions.
“John Carter defeating a roomful of swordsmen! Gahan
of Gathol splitting an opponent from crown to chin! Vor Daj lopping off
the head of a foe! All these are exciting scenes from the Mars books of
ERB. How true to life are they? Not the fact that they are laid on the
Red Planet. Not the fact that some of the swordsmen have six limbs. But
how true to the facts of life are the feats of these swordsmen?”
As expected, many other questions are posed during the
remainder of the article, but they are not offered directly to the reader,
as was the usual Harwood style. Instead, they are asked of a fictional
character that Harwood created. With questions in hand, Harwood claimed
to have visited an old friend, “Dr. Johann Van Marshall, curator of
the Museum of Medieval Weapons located in one of the almost forgotten parts
of Greater Boston.” The reminder of the article is in the form of an
interview, with Harwood describing some of the prodigious blade work described
in the Martian series, and Dr. Van Marshall speculating on the possibilities
that such feats could be accomplished in real life.
John Harwood’s Co-authors
Considering that John Harwood didn’t attend Dum-Dums
and apparently rarely met fellow ERB fans, it is interesting that he worked
with a variety of co-authors on fanzine projects. Harwood and H.W. Starr
were probably the first to question the need for Martian women to have
breasts and navels in their 1963 article, “A Scholarly Analysis of the
Females of Barsoom” (BB #14). The two worked together again
to produce
“Korak—Son of Tarzan?” (BB #16) and “Across
Darkest Africa with the Waziri” (BB #20). Pete Ogden shared
a byline with Harwood on a survey of the Tarzan series (ERBANIA #25,
1970), as did Camille Cazadessus, Jr. (aka “Caz”), on the article,
“The Ambidextrous Ape-Man” (ERB-dom #67, 1973). Finally,
John worked with Allan Howard to produce their “Tarzan Encyclopedia,”
published by Vern Coriell in 1974.
When Harwood collaborated with another fan, it was probably
more as a co-researcher than as a co-writer. After the two agreed to work
on a certain project, they probably did their separate research. Then,
through back-and-forth correspondence, their findings were shared and conclusions
reached. One of the two then wrote the article and probably offered it
to the other for comments and corrections. Of the three collaborations
between Harwood and Starr, I suspect that Harwood wrote “Korak—Son of
Tarzan?” and “Across Darkest Africa with the Waziri.” Both are
marked by Harwood’s question-and-answer style. Starr, however, must have
been the writer of “A Scholarly Analysis of the Females of Barsoom.”
This article contains an element of humor that, frankly, is quite unlike
any ERB-related article John Harwood wrote.
It’s time to assess John Harwood’s place in the history
of Burroughs fandom. Certainly he was a prolific writer of fanzine articles
and letters. There have been many other fans, however, who have written
just as often for the fanzines over the years. How John Harwood ranks among
them depends much on the preferences of the person doing the ranking. For
those who like, as I do, reading detailed articles about ERB’s stories,
then there has never been any better fanzine writer than John Harwood.
On the other hand, to those Burroughs fans who have little interest in
such articles, Harwood was simply just another fanzine writer.
Whatever the varied opinions of Harwood’s writing style
and content, however, he did make three unique contributions to fan scholarship
for which he deserves special recognition in the history of Burroughs fandom.
The first was his work in the area of Tarzan chronology, and the second
was his “Literature of Burroughsiana.” The third wouldn’t surface
until nearly 30 years after Harwood’s death.
Putting the Focus on Tarzan
Chronology
Since Vern Coriell’s first efforts to organize ERB fandom,
surely no subject has been debated as much as Tarzan chronology. Some of
the many who have taken a position on the subject are Philip José
Farmer, Pete Ogden, Frank J. Brueckel, John F. Roy, and Mike Moody. Even
I must confess to spending many hours and not just a few dollars on the
subject. However, all of us who have ever dabbled in the subject of Tarzan
chronology, followed in the footsteps of John Harwood, for he first brought
up the subject, defined it, and outlined the two basic solutions to the
problem.
Way back in December 1947, in Burroughs Bulletin #6,
fandom’s first article on Tarzan chronology appeared. It was John Harwood’s
“How Old Is Tarzan?” In it he explained something that most Burroughs
readers at the time had probably never noticed, that the dates ERB used
in the first eight Tarzan novels appear to contradict each other. In his
usual logical style, Harwood started with the 1888 date provided by ERB
in Tarzan of the Apes and worked forward to show that Tarzan’s
family was reunited in 1929 at the end of The Son of Tarzan.
But then Harwood pointed out that at the end of Tarzan the Terrible,
Burroughs placed Tarzan’s son Jack on the Argonne front in World War I.
Since the war ended in 1918, the statement obviously ran counter to the
timing of events in the first four Tarzan novels. Taking the statement
in Tarzan the Terrible at face value, and assuming that Jack
was 18 in the year 1914, Harwood then worked backwards until he came up
with an 1872 date for Tarzan’s birth. This was the first expression of
the “push-back theory” that a number of ERB fan scholars have accepted.
At the end of his article, Harwood accepted the theory.
That was not to be John Harwood’s final stance on the
subject, however. In the mid-1960s, after other fans began to punch holes
in his theory, Harwood took up the subject again. He seemed to realize
that in his initial article he had not fully considered all the evidence
and possibilities, and being the perfectionist that he was, he needed to
reassess the question, even if it meant admitting his first conclusion
was wrong. He teamed up with H.W. Starr, and their article, “Korak —
Son of Tarzan?” appeared in Burroughs Bulletin #16 in August
1966. Harwood started out by admitting his previous research was flawed.
“At
first, the revised list of dates seemed to take care of everything. Then
varying inconsistencies began to crop up pointing to other facts that were
out of line with history.”
As a couple of examples, Harwood pointed out that the
six-cylinder car Burroughs described as being in Wisconsin in Tarzan
of the Apes was an impossibility in the “push-back theory” year
of 1894. Also, Harwood noted that historically the exploitation of natives
by a European power was unlikely in the year 1872. These facts seemed to
fit much better with the 1888 date for the birth of Tarzan that ERB provided
in Tarzan of the Apes. Harwood was then faced with a dilemma.
Either to abandon all the dates given in Tarzan of the Apes,
or conclude that there never was a character named Korak. Howard and Starr
came up with a way around the dilemma. Korak was Tarzan’s cousin, not his
son. Admitting that their theory “seemed almost sacrilege,” Harwood
and Starr embraced it anyway as the only way to accept the dates of “Apes”
and the existence of Korak. Theories about when Tarzan was born that Harwood
put forward, both in 1947 and in 1966, resulted in much debate among Tarzan
fans for several decades.
The Literature of Burroughsiana
John Harwood’s second lasting contribution to Burroughs
fan scholarship was his “Literature of Burroughsiana.” In his 1961
autobiographical sketch, Harwood explained the genesis of the project.
“When the old LITERARY DIGEST published the article
entitled HOW TARZAN KEPT THE WOLF FROM THE DOOR in the November 30, 1929,
issue, I became a fan of Burroughs, the man, as well as Burroughs the writer.
For a long while, this was the only item of a biographical nature in my
ERB collection. Then the July 29, 1939, issue of the Saturday Evening Post
published the article, HOW TO BECOME A GREAT WRITER by Alva Johnson. After
adding this to my collection, I decided to see if many such articles had
been written about the author or his works. Armed with a pencil and paper,
I invaded the reference room of the local library and searched through
some of the various indexes and complied a long list of magazine articles
that had been written over the years. As some of the magazines were still
available in the library, I took them out, a few at a time, starting with
the oldest ones first and copied the articles for my notebooks. Then in
various reference books at the library I found brief articles about he
author which I copied by hand and transferred as typed copies to my notebooks
when I got home. This was the start of my collection of biographical and
critical material about ERB and his works.”
Through the years, Harwood continued to add to his collection
of ERB-related newspaper and magazine articles. In 1954, his organized
list of articles appeared in Barsomian #7 under the title, “The
Literature of Burroughsiana.” It began modestly in that first appearance
with only about 115 entries. Over the course of the next nine years, with
the help of many other Burroughs fans, Harwood greatly expanded his list
of ERB-related articles. It culminated in a 105-page book, containing over
1,000 entries, published by Caz in 1963. The title page described the contents
of “The Literature of Burroughsiana” as follows:
“A listing of magazine articles, book commentaries,
news items, book reviews, movie reviews, fanzines, amateur publications
and related items concerning the life and/or works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Compiled and with commentary by John Harwood.”
With the publication of this volume, a new world was open
for hundreds of Burroughs fans. Any fan who lived near a public library
now had access to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of articles dealing with ERB
that he never knew existed. Of course, today the volume seems woefully
inadequate. However, it is quite possible that a number of articles cataloged
in “The Literature of Burroughsiana” would have remained
unknown to this day had John Harwood not discovered and revealed their
existence back in 1963.
“The Tarzan Encyclopedia”
As Burroughs fandom entered the 1970s, John Harwood had
been a major player for a quarter of a century, and he showed no signs
of slowing down. In the early 1970s, Harwood regularly reviewed books,
both fiction and non-fiction, for Pete Ogden’s ERBANIA. At the same
time, his byline continued to appear in other fanzines, such as The
Burroughs Bulletin, ERB-dom, and Erbivore. In early 1975, Vern
Coriell published John Harwood and Allan Howard’s “Tarzan Encyclopedia.”
It was a 41-page compendium of all the characters and terms to be found
in ERB’s Tarzan stories. Included were ape-English and Pal-ul-don dictionaries,
as well as synopses of all 26 Tarzan stories. This first collaborative
effort between Harwood and Howard was another important fan effort by two
men who had been preeminent among fanzine writers for several decades.
It seemed that they would go on forever.
For John Harwood, however, it appeared to be one last
remarkable effort in a long list of contributions to Burroughs fandom.
Suddenly, there were no more John Harwood articles in the Burroughs fanzines.
His regular letters-to-the-editor stopped. Although the reason for John
Harwood’s absence was unknown to most fans back then, it now appears it
was due to his declining health. Years later, Burroughs Bibliophiles president
Bob Hyde revealed that in his files he had a letter from the executor of
John Harwood’s estate informing him that John died on July 15, 1980,
of colon cancer. He was 65 years old.
John Harwood’s death went virtually unnoticed in Burroughs
fandom. ERB-dom had ceased publication several years earlier, and Vern’s
publishing was grinding to a halt. I found no reference of John’s passing
in any of the remaining fanzines still being published. There was no “Lifetime
Achievement Award” from The Burroughs Bibliophiles for John Harwood. There
was no remembrance of him at the next Dum-Dum. It could be argued that
John Harwood neither sought nor would have been comfortable with any of
the above accolades. It seems a shame, though, that Burroughs fandom, which
had received so much from John Harwood, could not have found some way to
show its gratitude posthumously.
“Heritage of the Flaming
God”
Two decades after his death, John Harwood gave one last
gift to fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In 2000, “Heritage of the Flaming
God: An Essay on the History of Opar and Its Relationship to Other Cultures”
was published by Waziri Publications. The extended essay was a collaborative
effort between John Harwood and Frank J. Brueckel. The two long-time ERB
fans started working on the essay together in 1966. In a 1976 article
in “The Gridley Wave,” Harwood explained how the essay was written
and submitted for publication.
“We worked on the article from 1966 to 1971 with Frank
doing most of the writing. I’d send in a five or six page version of a
chapter and he’d rewrite it in his own words containing the essence of
my ideas plus material added by himself. His version would run 10 to 15
pages of more professional type writing.
“Frank sent the manuscript to Vernell Coriell in July
of 1971 to be published in the Burroughs Bulletin. He personally delivered
the completed work to me when he came east on his vacation around the last
of July that year. It was good visiting with him in person after five years
of letter writing.”
Probably due to financial and other personal difficulties,
Vern never published the essay that Harwood and Brueckel had spent five
long years writing. Neither of the authors lived to seen “Heritage of
the Flaming God” in print. Brueckel died in 1976 and Harwood in 1980.
At some point, Philip José Farmer read the essay and used the world
of ancient Opar described in it as a backdrop for two novels, “Hadon
of Ancient Opar” (1974) and “Flight to Opar” (1976).
When Vern Coriell died in 1990, the manuscript was found
among his papers and transferred to The University of Louisville’s Edgar
Rice Burroughs collection. Copies of the essay found their way into the
hands of a small group of Burroughs fans, one of whom sent a copy to me
in the spring of 1998. Fascinated, I resolved to publish it. With the help
of co-editor Michael Winger, “Heritage of the Flaming God”
by John Harwood and Frank J. Brueckel was finally published and made available
to all Burroughs fans. Two decades after his death, John Harwood had made
another major contribution to the “Literature of Burroughsiana.”
Legacy
Back in 1961, when Vern Coriell asked John Harwood to
provide a biographical sketch to run under the column heading of “John
Harwood — Burroughs Bibliophile,” John balked at first. He explained
to Vern that he felt out of place in The Burroughs Bibliophiles, since
his collection consisted only of reading copies of ERB’s books. John suggested
to Vern that the space “could be better occupied with a story about
a fan with a big collection that was really worth writing about.” Vern
finally convince John to write his autobiographical sketch, and I think
quoting Vern’s editor’s note following the column is a fitting way to close
this remembrance of John Harwood.
“John Harwood has devoted countless hours of his time
to research on articles and the compilation of information about ERB and
his works that has proved most beneficial to Burroughs fans and collectors.
Every ERB enthusiast owes Harwood a nod of thanks … for through his efforts
many an ERB item has been rescued from oblivion by being brought to the
attention of collectors … In my opinion, John Harwood is more of a Burroughs
Bibliophile than 99% of us.”
— The End —
