Edgar Rice Burroughs

• 1. Introduction

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  Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on the 1st of September, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth son of Major George Tyler Burroughs, a Civil War veteran and businessman. By the time he died on the 19th of March, 1950, he had written almost 80 novels, earned over two million dollars in royalties from 27 Tarzan films alone, and given birth to one of the most enduring fictional characters in history. But none of that was obvious in 1911, when a thirty-six-year-old failed mine manager, railroad clerk, and pencil-sharpener wholesaler sat down and started writing stories for pulp magazines. What drove a man who had failed at almost everything to become one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century? And how did a character born out of English aristocratic fantasy end up reshaping popular culture worldwide, naming a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and inspiring generations of scientists, explorers, and dreamers?

• 2. False Starts and Low Wages

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  In 1903, Burroughs headed to southern Idaho to help his brothers George and Harry manage the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company, where he took charge of their Snake River gold dredge. The operation failed. He then worked for the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Salt Lake City, resigning in October 1904. The years that followed were a succession of modest jobs, including a stint as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, a trade that left him plenty of spare time. He began reading the pulp magazines of the day, and what he read did not impress him. In 1929, he recalled thinking that if people were paid for writing what he called "rot" in those magazines, he could write stories just as entertaining, and probably a great deal more so. That conviction, formed somewhere around 1911, is the unlikely foundation of everything that followed. His wife Emma, whom he had married in January 1900, had already given him two children by this point: Joan, born in 1908, and Hulbert, born in 1909.

• 3. The Pulp Debut

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  Writing under the name "Norman Bean" to protect his reputation, Burroughs submitted his first story to Frank Munsey, who serialized it in The All-Story from February to July of 1912. That story, Under the Moons of Mars, launched the Barsoom series, introduced the character John Carter, and earned Burroughs four hundred dollars, which is equivalent to roughly twelve thousand dollars today. He had barely finished that run when he completed two more novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, which began publishing in October 1912. Burroughs constructed a rich geography of imagined worlds: Barsoom as his fictional Mars, Amtor as his fictional Venus, and Pellucidar as the hollow interior of the Earth. Many of his stories also appeared in The Argosy magazine alongside the All-Story pieces. By 1923, confident enough in his commercial standing, he formed his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s, an unusual degree of self-sufficiency for an author of that era.

• 4. Tarzan and the Media Machine

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  Experts at the time warned Burroughs against spreading Tarzan across multiple media. They argued that films, merchandise, and a syndicated comic strip would compete against one another and dilute the character. Burroughs rejected the advice entirely, and the public proved him right at every turn. Tarzan sold in whatever form he was offered. In 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles and named it Tarzana. By 1927, the community that grew up around it voted to keep the name when the town of Tarzana, California, was officially formed. That same year, 1927, the unincorporated Texas community of Tarzan was formally named when the US Postal Service accepted the name, a recognition tied to the popularity of the first silent Tarzan film, which starred Elmo Lincoln. Burroughs's daughter Joan married James Pierce, the Tarzan film actor, and she voiced Jane in the Tarzan radio series from 1932 to 1934. The franchise wove itself into his family as tightly as it wove itself into American culture.

• 5. Ideology Beneath the Adventure

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  Tarzan was not only an entertainment property. Burroughs designed the character to embody a specific set of beliefs about heredity and race. Tarzan is born to English nobles, adopted by talking apes called the Mangani, and grows up to surpass not only his ape family but black Africans, whom Burroughs portrays as inherently inferior. In one Tarzan story, Burroughs imagined an ancient civilization that had practiced eugenics for over two thousand years, producing a society free of crime on the theory that criminal behavior is entirely hereditary. The solution depicted included killing not only criminals but their families. A later novel, Lost on Venus, published in 1933, describes a similar society where forced sterilization is practiced and the "unfit" are eliminated. Lost on Venus appeared the same year the Nazis came to power. Burroughs also wrote an unpublished nonfiction essay titled I See A New Race, where he endorsed these ideas explicitly. In Pirate Blood, an unpublished non-speculative novel, characters are presented as victims of their criminal ancestry, one descending from the corsair Jean Lafitte and another from the Jukes family.

• 6. War Correspondent at Sixty-Eight

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  In the 1920s, Burroughs became a pilot, bought a Security Airster S-1, and encouraged his whole family to take up flying. His personal life grew complicated: he divorced Emma in 1934 and married Florence Gilbert Dearholt in 1935, the former wife of his friend Ashton Dearholt. The two men had co-founded Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises together while filming The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs adopted the Dearholts' two children; he and Florence divorced in 1942. When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, Burroughs was in Honolulu and in his late sixties. Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to serve as a war correspondent, making him one of the oldest US war correspondents of World War II. William Brinkley referenced this chapter of his life in the bestselling novel Don't Go Near the Water.

• 7. Legacy and the Crater on Mars

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  Ray Bradbury, in a Paris Review interview, called Burroughs probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world, arguing that by giving romance and adventure to a generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. The assessment was deliberate provocation, but it was grounded in something real: because of the role Burroughs's science fiction played in inspiring actual exploration of Mars, an impact crater on Mars was named in his honor after his death. Rudyard Kipling, in Something of Myself published posthumously in 1937, acknowledged that Tarzan had taken the motif of his own Jungle Books and, in Kipling's phrase, "jazzed" it. By 1963, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction noted that an entire generation had grown up without Burroughs's books in print, and expressed surprise that publishers including Canaveral Press, Dover Publications, and Ballantine Books had begun reprinting them again. Burroughs was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2003. As of 2025, the Oak Park Public Library holds a significant special collection of his work, gathered in part from a block party organized in 1975 by a group calling itself CHEETAH, Citizens Holding Exercises Extolling Tarzan's Anniversary Here, and compiled by Florence Moyer.