First published in 1924, The Land That Time Forgot begins as a WWI submarine adventure. The first third of the short novel is devoted to the adventures of the scion of a shipyard that built the very German U-Boat that sinks the luxury liner he is cruising on.

ERB’s stock in trade was lost world and cosmic transportation yarns with a heavy dose of romanticism. He was the master at beginning a story with a believable, matter of fact situation that develops into an adventure, an adventure that develops into a fantastic adventure in some lost world. As he often did ERB provided a forward, in which a person finds the journal of the shipyard scion bobbing in the surf off of Greenland in ‘A perfectly good quart thermos bottle.’

ERB’s work can get old as much of the content is often given over to romanticized love interests. If one looks deeper we see in the lost world themes, and the need for strong risk-taking men to preserve decency, a series of troubling allegories about modernity. Compared to Howard he comes off as half visionary and half sellout. We must recall though that ERB set the bar for pulp fiction, and that Howard modeled some of his work after the far more successful Burroughs.

The Land That Time Forgot might be classified as children’s literature because the science is so off a hundred years after. But there is a lot of soul in this work, as the protagonist searches within throughout the entire story, never becoming a mere plot device, as he struggles to survive with honor in a savage world with a woman to care for, ever amazed at where “the last corner of life’s highway” took him, when he was taken—like his message in the bottle—by “the inscrutable forces of the sea.”

Like all of Edgar Rice Burroughs' many protagonists, this man—though rarely named compared to John Carter and Tarzan in their sagas—is merely a socio-economic place holder, 'just getting by,' until danger strikes and he is cast into a primal order, where he comes to life through his suffering, temporarily rescued from the waking death of civilized life. ERB wrote for money, but he wrote beautifully, and he wrote for the young men of the first human generation to come of age in a world with no more frontiers, with nothing left for men to do other than be a cog in the gearbox of modernity, or to dream about a past in mute hope that so long as there is an idea about life outside the machine, that there might still be a home for the human soul.