John Carter of Mars

John Carter (or Captain Jack Carter) is the fictional hero in the Barsoom series of seminal science fiction novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Carter was 6'2" tall with close-cropped black hair and steel-gray eyes. His character and courtesy exemplified the ideals of the ante-bellum South (the southern U.S. states just before the American Civil War). A Virginian who served as a captain in the Civil War, he struck it rich by finding gold in Arizona after the war.

While hiding from Apaches in a cave, he found himself instantly and mysteriously transported to Mars, where he subsequently had many adventures.

He spent the last years of his life in a small cottage on the Hudson River in New York and died there on March 4 1886.