I came across an interesting post on my Facebook feed yesterday evening. Yes, sometimes you can find things that are worthwhile on Facebook. It's a letter that was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs to a young fan, and I think says some good things about reading and the defense of what he self-deprecatingly calls "garbage can literature."
More below:
The exchange was originally published in ERBzine, a noted Burroughs fanzine, and reprinted on the website Letters of Note.
Burroughs, of course, was the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars, and many other adventure novels. If he did not create the genre of the Planetary Romance, he was certainly its greatest champion.
The letter he received was from the 14-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman, soon to become one of the gurus of Science Fiction Fandom. Forry is perhaps most famous, (or infamous), for coining the term "Sci-Fi", and long had a mind-boggling collection of SF memorabilia. But at the time, he was just a junior high kid who got into an argument with his English teacher about whether ERB counted as "Good Literature." Afterwards, Forrest wrote a fan letter to Burroughs about it.
All you speak of is real to me. Hawthorne, Cooper and others may have written "Classics", but I'll take one of your fast-moving novels any day to those dead old things that ought to have been buried years ago.
Burroughs replied that his teacher was probably right about the quality of his stories, but that his many readers disagreed, "...which is fortunate for me, since even writers of garbage-can literature must eat."
My stories will do you no harm. If they have helped to inculcate in you a love of books, they have done you much good. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, of its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
I have to say that Burroughs, and adventure writers like him, certainly cultivated my own love of reading. Thanks, ERB; and thank you Forry for helping keep the flame alive.