John Norman is the pen name of John Frederick Lange, Jr., born June 3, 1931 in Chicago Illinois. Norman earned his B. A. from the University of Nebraska in 1953 and his M.A. from USC in 1957. In 1963, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton with a 149 page dissertation entitled, In Defence of Ethical Naturalism: An Examination of Certain Aspects of the Naturalistic Fallacy, With Particular Attention to the Logic of an Open Question Argument.
Norman is a protégé of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his influential Gor series bears parallels to Burroughs' John Carter of Mars. The Gor novels, his best known works, span 25 books written from 1967 to 1988, plus three installments of the Telnarian Histories, two other fiction works, and a nonfiction paperback entitled Imaginative Sex which was out of print for many years but has been reprinted recently by a specialty house. As John Lange he has written 'The Cognitivity Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Claims of Philosophy' and edited C. I.Lewis' 'Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics'.
Lange is a philosophy professor at Queens College of the City University of New York.
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