| The Eternal Lover | |
| Author: | Edgar Rice Burroughs |
| Cover Artist: | J. Allen St. John |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Fantasy, Lost world |
| Publisher: | A. C. McClurg |
| Release Date: | October 1925 |
| Media Type: | Print (hardback) |
| Pages: | 316 |
| Followed By: | The Mad King |
The Eternal Lover is a fantasy-adventure novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story was begun in November 1913 under the working title Nu of the Niocene. It was first run serially in two parts by All-Story Weekly.[1] The first part, released March 7, 1914 was titled "The Eternal Lover" and the second part, released in four installments from January 23, 1915 to February 13, 1915 was titled "Sweetheart Primeval". The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on October 3, 1925.
In 1963, Ace Paperback published a version under the title The Eternal Savage. An E-Text edition has been published by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and is available online.[2]
A cliff-dwelling warrior of 100,000 years ago, Nu, is magically transported to the present, falls in love with Victoria Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, the reincarnation of his lost lover Nat-ul, and the two are transported back to the Stone Age. The story is set in Africa, and the present-day sequences include Victoria's brother Barney Custer, protagonist of Burroughs's Ruritanian novel The Mad King, as well as Burroughs's iconic hero Tarzan from his Tarzan novels.
While the four Custer sibling novellas were first published in an alternating fashion; chronologically-speaking, the events of the two halves of The Eternal Lover/Savage occur between the two halves of The Mad King
Publication order:[1]
All four novellas—as they were serialized in All-Story Weekly—are in the public domain in the United States.[3]