The Mad King

An American with a Central European face is mistaken for a mad king who has escaped his keepers — and finds that impersonating him is easier than explaining, and considerably more dangerous. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and selling pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than what he was reading; this 1914 romance is his Ruritanian one, written at speed and moving like it. Fifty-six plates of exiled queens, royal departures and old German courts by painters including Philip de László and Adolph von Menzel give this Ruritanian romance its proper faces.