The First and Only Weekly Online Fanzine Devoted to the Life and Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Volume 0457


The Many Worlds of

"The master of imaginative fantasy adventure...
...the creator of Tarzan and...
...the 'grandfather of science-fiction'"

Meet Frank Blisard

Born in Philadelphia in 1951 and raised in an intensely Irish-American home, Blisard's earliest literary influences were a pre-World War II, 20-volume encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge, a bootleg copy of The Rheims-Douay Bible, and the handful of Edgar Rice Burroughs's novels that were available in the local  Public Library.  Introduced in High School  to more "serious" works of modern American and English literature (as well as the whole spectrum of pre- and post-Burroughs science fiction),  he went on during his college years to immerse himself in Rennaissance, Medieval, Classical, and Comparative European literatures and philosophies.  In graduate school, he plunged into the world of Pre-Classical Antiquity and Comparative Religions, only to emerge back into the real world in the early 1980s with a wife and two children and no visible means of support save a magical pen reputed to be "mightier than the sword." Repeated attempts at honest labor in the fields of  pedagogy, construction, the clerical sciences, publishing, petroleum delivery, and freelance editorial services finally led him to the inevitable realization that he was "born to write." He is now gainfully employed at a medical advertising agency in central New Jersey, where he resides with his wife of 20 years and two teenage offspring.

Frank and family in 1989 and 1999

In the mid-90s, while working in-house as "staff editor" for Africa World Press, he became aware of a hitherto unsuspected relationship between ERB and African Studies.  He found, for instance, that much of the history, geography, and terminology of contemporary African Studies (e.g., such terms as Shifta, manyuema, etc.)  were already familiar to him from his ample reading of ERB at an impressionable age.  He has since devoted much of his "spare time" to researching this fascinating relationship. Products of that research are the ERB-pastiche novel, Jack of Time, and a controversial series of articles on the subject of ERB and racism, now available online at the following ERBzin-e web pages: