Lords of the Stratosphere

Arthur Josephus Burks (September 13, 1898 – May 13, 1974) was an American Marine officer and fiction writer. Burks was born to a farming family in Waterville, Washington. He married Blanche Fidelia Lane on March 23, 1918, in Sacramento, California, and was the father of four Phillip Charles, Wasle Carmen, Arline Mary, and Gladys Lura. He served with the United States Marine Corps in World War I, and began writing in 1920. After being stationed in the Dominican Republic and inspired by the native voodoo rituals he'd learned about from Haitian prisoners in a military jail, Burks began to write stories of the supernatural that he sold to the magazine Weird Tales in 1924.