THE WORLD OF EDGAR RICE
BURROUGHS AND TARZAN OF THE APES
BURROUGHS AND TARZAN OF THE APES
| 1875 | Edgar Rice Burroughs is born in Chicago on September 1 to George Tyler Burroughs and Mary Evaline Burroughs. His father, a former Union Army officer during the American Civil War, runs a successful distillery business. Mary Evaline, a talented writer, raises the four Burroughs children while intermittently compiling a book, Memoirs of a War Bride, which Edgar will help her publish in 1914. |
| 1876 | Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is published. |
| 1881 | Edgar enters the Brown School in Chicago. He and his brothers become friends with the four Hulbert sisters; the youngest, Emma, will become Edgar’s wife. |
| 1883 | Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is published. |
| 1885 | A fire destroys George Burroughs’s distillery; over the next few years, he will create a new venture, the American Battery Company. |
| 1886 | Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is published. |
| 1887 | Diphtheria warnings motivate Mary Evaline to place Edgar in the private Maplehearst School for Girls until the outbreak subsides. Edgar exchanges letters with his two older brothers, Harry and George, who attend Yale. Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, the debut Sherlock Holmes story, is published. |
| 1888 | Edgar enters the Harvard School in Chicago. |
| 1891 | When a flu epidemic erupts, Edgar’s parents, concerned that he has had several bouts with childhood illness, remove him from school and send him to work on his older brothers’ ranch in Idaho; he develops what will be a lifelong passion for horseback riding. Under protest, he is sent in the fall to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, where he contributes regularly to the school newspaper. |
| 1892 | Edgar leaves Phillips because of ill health and poor grades. Hoping to provide his son some discipline, George sends Edgar to the Michigan Military Academy. The results are mixed: Edgar is punished for attempting to run away from the academy, but he then begins playing football, his studies improve, and he writes for the school newspaper. |
| 1894 | Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is published. |
| 1895 | Burroughs graduates from the Michigan Military Academy, then tries but fails to secure a place at West Point. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is published. |
| 1896 | The adventurous young man joins the U.S. Army and travels to the Arizona Territory with hopes of battling Apaches, but illness and boredom sour the experience. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau is published. |
| 1897 | Discharged from the army, Burroughs returns to Chicago and works for his father at the American Battery Company. He begins courting his childhood sweetheart, Emma Centennia Hulbert. An interest in drawing leads him to enroll for a short time in the Chicago Art Institute. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published. |
| 1898 | Burroughs leaves for Idaho to help his brothers on the family ranch. He opens a stationery shop in Pocatello, intending to import magazines and periodicals to the Wild West, but business is bad. Burroughs has a few poems published in the local newspaper. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is published. |
| 1899 | After an unsuccessful trip to New York to try to secure another army post, Burroughs again works at the American Battery Company. |
| 1900 | Edgar and Emma marry in Chicago. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is published. |
| 1903 | Burroughs leaves American Battery and takes Emma to Idaho to prospect for gold. Still interested in drawing, he also writes his first fiction, Minidoka, which he subtitles An Historical Fairy Tale. Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild. |
| 1904 | The gold venture fails, and Burroughs struggles to make a living, working for the next few years at several jobs—among them railroad police officer, construction worker, door-to-door salesman, and candy vendor. |
| 1906 | Still struggling to make ends meet, Burroughs attempts unsuccessfully to enlist in the Chinese army. |
| 1907 | He takes a managerial job in the correspondence department at Sears, Roebuck. |
| 1908 | A daughter, Joan, is born. Although he makes a decent living at Sears, a yearning for independence leads him to start his own advertising company, but it fails. Edgar and Emma pawn some possessions to make ends meet. |
| 1909 | Burroughs begins hawking a supposed tonic for alcoholism, but authorities shut down the business. A son, Hulbert, is born. |
| 1911 | After reading some pulp-fiction magazines, Burroughs writes his own story, “Under the Moons of Mars,” for which the magazine The All-Story pays him the impressive sum of $400. He begins writing Tarzan of the Apes. |
| 1912 | All-Story accepts Tarzan of the Apes, paying Burroughs $700 for the novel, which it publishes in its entirety. Reader response is enthusiastic, and the magazine is flooded with requests for more Tarzan installments. Conan Doyle’s science-fiction novel The Lost World is published. |
| 1913 | A son, John, is born. All-Story serializes The Gods of Mars. New Story serializes The Return of Tarzan; N. C. Wyeth paints the cover art for the third installment. |
| 1914 | Tarzan of the Apes is released in book form. Burroughs writes many stories during the next few years. World War I begins. |
| 1915 | Burroughs attempts to sell a number of works to Hollywood film companies. Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is published. |
| 1916 | Burroughs details a three-month family camping trip in the diary Auto-Gypsying. The family spends the winter in Los Angeles while he negotiates with film producers and tries to secure a commission to fight in World War I; he ultimately joins the reserves. |
| 1918 | Two films based on Burroughs’s works, Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan, debut to great success, but Burroughs is frustrated by the simplistic way Hollywood depicts Tarzan. In addition to his fiction, Burroughs publishes patriotic articles. |
| 1919 | He moves his family to California, where he buys a large ranch he names Tarzana. |
| 1920 | Besides running the ranch and subdividing the land, Burroughs is busy with his writing; he will publish twenty-four Tarzan novels during his career, in addition to countless stories and articles. |
| 1923 | Burroughs forms his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., to handle increasing demands for Tarzan-related material and merchandise. |
| 1924 | He publishes The Land That Time Forgot, a novel in which dinosaurs and winged humanoids, along with other primitive species and modern humans, live on an island in the South Pacific. |
| 1925 | Tarzan of the Apes is now published in at least seventeen languages. The family celebrates Burroughs’s fiftieth birthday by taking a camping trip to the Grand Canyon. |
| 1929 | The first daily comic strip featuring Tarzan appears. |
| 1930 | Following many years of work to create a town out of the community that has grown up around Burroughs’s ranch, the first Tarzana post office opens. Despite his success with his Tarzan enterprise, Burroughs fails at other business ventures, including several investments in airplane technology. During the 1930s H. P. Lovecraft begins publishing science fiction works, increasing the popularity of the genre. |
| 1932 | The premiere of the first Tarzan “talkie,” Tarzan, the ApeMan, is a big success; even Burroughs is pleased with the film, which stars Johnny Weissmuller. The first Tarzan radio show airs. |
| 1934 | Flying lessons are Burroughs’s favorite pastime. He falls in love with an actress, Florence Dearholt; he and Emma divorce. Concerned that he is not considered a serious writer, he writes several pieces under pseudonyms, including an epic poem about Genghis Khan; most are rejected. |
| 1935 | Edgar and Florence marry; they spend their honeymoon sailing and learning to surf in Hawaii. |
| 1940 | In response to financial difficulties, Burroughs and his family move to Hawaii. |
| 1941 | Florence leaves Edgar, who consequently suffers from ill health and depression; the two divorce. He witnesses the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later becomes a columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser. |
| 1942 | Burroughs becomes a war correspondent in the South Pacific. |
| 1945 | George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears. |
| 1949 | After years of ill health, Burroughs suffers a massive heart attack. |
| 1950 | On March 19 Edgar Rice Burroughs dies in Encino, California, while reading the Sunday comics; he is buried in Tarzana. |