Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1st, 1875. His father, George Tyler Burroughs, was a Civil War veteran and now a successful businessman. Major Burroughs and his wife Mary had five other boys besides Edgar, but two of the children died in infancy, leaving Edgar the youngest of the family.

"Eddie" attended several schools during his formative years, often being shuttled from one to another due to the outbreak of various diseases. At this time it was standard to learn Greek and Latin in addition to English composition, and Burroughs would often lament his erratic schooling, which resulted in his (or so he said) learning little English while taking the same Greek and Latin courses over and over again. Despite his claims to the contrary, this early exposure to Classical literature and mythology would serve Burroughs well in his future writing career.

An influenza epidemic hit Chicago in 1891; hundreds died, and Edgar's worried parents wondered how they could protect their fifteen-year-old son. A few years earlier two of Edgar's brothers, George and Harry, had started a cattle ranch out west in Idaho. This seemed like a logical safe haven, so George and Mary packed Edgar onto an Idaho-bound train.

Ed took to the frontier life like a duck to water. He rode the range, herded cattle, busted a bucking broncho, and got to know a few thieves, murderers and bad men. Idaho at this time was still a pretty rough-and-tumble place; a range war was brewing between cattle ranchers and sheepmen, the law was fairly lax, and there were even shootouts at the local saloon. Young Ed loved the half year he spent in Idaho-- then his parents found out about these sordid events of frontier life and sent Ed off to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

But Ed wound up being a bit too rough-and-tumble himself for the faculty at Andover, so the Major shipped his son off to the Michigan Military Academy at Orchard Lake. Here Ed's frontier skills stood him in good stead; he became an excellent trick rider and crack shot, and even did fairly well in his studies. Not that he was an angel during his stay at MMI (he tried deserting during his first year, among other escapades) but Burroughs had apparently found an atmosphere conducive to his spirit. 

Burroughs graduated from the Michigan Military Academy in 1895 but, not really knowing what to do with his life, accepted the Academy's offer of an instructorship. Hankering to see some action, Ed quit his position with the Academy early the next year and signed up with the U.S. Army as a buck private in the hopes of eventually becoming an officer. Being a natural horseman Ed got his wish and was assigned to the Seventh United States Cavalry (General Custer's old regiment) stationed at Fort Grant, Arizona Territory.

Burroughs would define this as a time where he "chased Apaches, but never caught up with them." The best he succeeded in catching was dysentery. The work was far from glamorous, mainly digging ditches and repairing the rickety fort. Burroughs went out on patrols but the few Apache renegades still roaming free proved quite elusive. To compound matters, during a routine medical exam the post doctor determined that Burroughs had a heart murmur and thus ineligible to be promoted to the officer class. With an army career now out of the question, Ed received his discharge in early 1897.

Ed made another go of it in Idaho, punching cows for his brothers and others, even running a dry goods store for a time. This rather freeform life couldn't last forever, so in 1899 it was back to Chicago and work at his father's American Battery Company. With a steady paycheck he decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, Emma Centennia Hulbert, in 1900. But a regular routine apparently wasn't what Ed wanted, so in 1904 he and Emma struck out again for Idaho.

The next several years would be a frustrating search by Ed for his place in life. His brothers George and Harry had given up cattle ranching for gold dredging, but this program fizzled shortly after Ed arrived. He got a job as a railway policeman in Salt Lake City but gave up after awhile and took Emma back to Chicago. Among his many short-live jobs were door-to-door salesman, an accountant, the manager for the clerical department of Sears, Roebuck & Company, peddler for a quack alcoholism cure and, finally, a pencil sharpener wholesaler. By this point (1911) Burroughs had two children (Joan and Hulbert), was flat broke, and was left with only one way out of this cycle: he could dream.

So the story goes, Edgar Rice Burroughs was sitting in his rented office and waiting for his crack pencil sharpener salesmen to report in, supposedly their pockets bulging with orders. Besides waiting, one of Burroughs' duties was to verify the placement of advertisements for his sharpeners in various magazines. These were all-fiction "pulp" magazines, a prime source of escapist reading material for the rapidly expanding middle class. Verifying the pencil sharpener ads didn't exactly take much time. The pencil sharpener salesmen never showed up, so Burroughs spent his idle time reading those pulp magazines. And an idea was born. 

After reading several thousand words of breathless pulp fiction Burroughs determined-- or so he claimed -- that "if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines." This may be nothing more than a legend Burroughs liked to tell to show how he came into his own as a writer. He had actually written stories before this time, mostly fairy tales and poems he created for his children, nieces and nephews.

But in 1911, Burroughs decided to write a full-blown novel, and the tale he wrote was as far removed from the life of a pencil sharpener wholesaler as one could possibly imagine. This flight of fancy, entitled "Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess," was so exotic that Burroughs was worried that editors might think he was a little touched in the head. So he submitted the story under a pseudonym, Normal Bean, a joke indicating that his head was indeed screwed on the right way.

In submitting his manuscript to All-Story magazine he found luck the first time out: editor Thomas Metcalf liked the tale and offered Burroughs 400 dollars, an extravagant sum. The story, renamed "Under the Moons of Mars," was serialized from February to July of 1912. Burroughs wound up being renamed as well: his pseudonym was changed to Norman Bean. (When this story appeared in book form it received its final title, A Princess of Mars; both Normal and Norman were abandoned in favor of the author's real name.) By the time of the last installment of "Under the Moons of Mars" Burroughs had completed his third novel. The second one, "The Outlaw of Torn," was rejected by Metcalf, but the third novel was a little trifle called "Tarzan of the Apes." Burroughs was now a bona fide full-time writer.

Tarzan of the Apes" appeared in the October 1912 issue of All-Story magazine. Burroughs received 700 dollars for the tale and his career was off and running. Burroughs quickly discovered (probably to his secret delight, and certainly to the delight of countless readers) that he had many more tales to tell. There would be the inevitable Tarzan and Mars sequels but Burroughs' imagination needed even more worlds in which to roam, and so in the next few years he would try his hand at almost every type of story imaginable. Burroughs created the fabulous prehistoric inner world of Pellucidar (starting with At the Earth's Core), wrote other cave man fantasies (The Eternal Savage and The Land That Time Forgot), tales of courtly intrigue (The Mad King), a horror story (The Monster Men), novels of social realism (The Girl From Hollywood), Robinson Crusoe-type adventures (The Cave Girl), and one story that combined all of the above (The Mucker). Later still he would write westerns (The War Chief and others) and created yet another series, this one set on the planet Venus (starting with Pirates of Venus). But Tarzan would earn Burroughs his greatest success. 

Burroughs liked to think of himself as a hard-headed businessman and concluded that he could make an even better living if he founded his own company. And so in 1923 Burroughs became an employee of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. This was an unusual step for an author to take, although it is now quite common. Burroughs would even start publishing his own books, beginning in 1931 with "Tarzan the Invincible". The last book to appear under the Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. imprint was "I Am a Barbarian" in 1967.

Tarzan was a cultural sensation when introduced. Burroughs was determined to capitalize on Tarzan's popularity in every way possible. He planned to exploit Tarzan through several different media including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, movies and merchandise. Experts in the field advised against this course of action, stating that the different media would just end up competing against each other. Burroughs went ahead, however, and proved the experts wrong—the public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Burroughs was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late sixties, he applied for permission to become a war correspondent. This permission was granted, and so he became one of the oldest war correspondents for the U.S. during World War II. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where, after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written almost seventy novels.

Burroughs influenced both science fiction and science.   Burroughs' Barsoom series was extremely popular with American readers and many scientists who grew up reading the novels, and helped inspire public support for the US space program. Readers included some of the first space pioneers and those involved in the search for life on other planets.

Well-known early science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke both read, and were inspired by Burroughs' series of Barsoom books in their youth. Bradbury admired Burroughs' stimulating romantic tales, and they were an inspiration for The Martian Chronicles, in which he used some similar concepts of a dying Mars. Robert A. Heinlein also wrote fiction inspired by Burroughs' Barsoom series, and for many others, the Barsoom series helped to establish Mars as an adventurous, enticing destination for the imagination. The John Carter books enjoyed another wave of popularity in the 1970s, with Vietnam War veterans who said they could identify with Carter, fighting in a war on another planet.

The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in his honor.