EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
When Edgar Rice Burroughs sat down to write his
now-legendary Tarzan of the Apes in 1911, he had a young
family to support and a string of business failures weighing
heavily on his mind. Among other ventures, he had sifted for gold
in Idaho, run a stationery store, worked as a railroad policeman,
and sold candy, light bulbs, and a snake-oil cure for alcoholism.
Nothing led to success, however, and since he had been reduced to
pawning some of his possessions for food, it’s reasonable to think
that escapism played a role in inspiring his wildly imaginative
early tales.
Life was not always so financially fraught for
Burroughs, who was born into a prosperous Chicago family on
September 1, 1875. His father, a former Union Army officer, owned a
distillery and then a battery company; his mother raised four sons,
of whom Edgar was youngest. Also the most rebellious, he spent one
unsuccessful year at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts before being
sent to the Michigan Military Academy; there, although he excelled
in Greek and Latin, his academic life took second place to writing
and drawing for the school newspaper, horseback riding, and playing
football. A taste for adventure and dreams of battling Apache
warriors in Arizona led Burroughs to join the Army in 1896. But
when poor health and boredom set in, he pleaded with his father to
get him released from duty. After working for a short time for his
father’s company and marrying his childhood sweetheart, Burroughs
flailed from one business failure to another before striking it
rich with his fictional ape-man.
His first Tarzan story, Tarzan of the
Apes, was published in 1912 by the pulp-fiction magazine The
All-Story. The tale of a man reared by apes in an African
jungle caused a sensation among readers of all ages and quickly
became a cultural icon. Despite Burroughs’s desire to write more
serious fiction, demand for additional Tarzan adventures persisted
throughout the author’s life; he created a total of twenty-four
Tarzan tales. A secondary market for Tarzan comics, films, radio
shows, and the like led Burroughs to create his own corporation,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., to manage the Tarzan empire.
At home at Tarzana, his 540-acre estate in
California, Burroughs held interviews, rode horses, and wrote.
Besides a large number of books, including three science-fiction
series (set on Mars, Venus, and in the hollow core of Earth), he
also authored many patriotic journal pieces and, after witnessing
the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, served as a war
correspondent in the South Pacific. After a year spent rereading
all of his books, Edgar Rice Burroughs died of a heart attack while
perusing the Sunday comics on March 19, 1950.