Antecedents
The first science fiction to be set on Mars may be Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record, by Percy Greg, published in 1880. Another Mars novel, dealing with benevolent Martians arriving on Earth, was published in 1897 by Kurd Lasswitz, Auf Zwei Planeten. Not translated until 1971, Burroughs likely did not know of it.
H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898) was influenced, as was Burrough’s novel, by the ideas of Percival Lowell starting with publication of the book Mars (1895). It assumed Mars being an ancient world, nearing the end of its life, being the home of a superior civilization, capable of advanced feats of science and engineering. Burroughs, however, claimed never to have read any of H.G. Wells books.
It is possible, as Richard A. Lupoff argues in the book Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, that Burroughs took some inspiration from the 1905 novel Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, by Edwin Lester Arnold, which also featured an American military man transported to Mars. Lupoff also suggested John Carter has strong similarities to Phra, hero of Arnold's The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890), who is also a master swordsman who appears to be immortal.
Read more about this topic: A Princess Of Mars
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“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
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