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Edgar Rice Burroughs | HearLore
Common questions
When was Edgar Rice Burroughs born and where?
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on the 1st of September 1875 in Chicago, Illinois. He was born into a family of English and Pennsylvania Dutch descent that had been in North America since the Colonial era.
What year did Edgar Rice Burroughs publish his first story Under the Moons of Mars?
Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first story Under the Moons of Mars in 1912. He submitted the story to Frank Munsey's The All-Story magazine and published it under the pseudonym Norman Bean to protect his reputation.
Why did Edgar Rice Burroughs support eugenics and scientific racism?
Edgar Rice Burroughs supported eugenics and scientific racism because he believed that English nobles made up a particular heritable elite among Anglo-Saxons. He expressed these views in his fiction and in his unpublished nonfiction essay I See A New Race.
When did Edgar Rice Burroughs die and where is he buried?
Edgar Rice Burroughs died of a heart attack on the 19th of March 1950. He is buried in Tarzana, California, US.
Which library holds a significant special collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs works as of 2025?
As of 2025, the Oak Park Public Library holds a significant special collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs various works. The collection includes rare books, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and old Tarzan films.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on the 1st of September 1875 in Chicago, Illinois, into a family of English and Pennsylvania Dutch descent that had been in North America since the Colonial era. His father, Major George Tyler Burroughs, was a Civil War veteran and businessman, while his mother, Mary Evaline Zieger, came from a line of Puritan settlers including Deacon Edmund Rice. Burroughs's own lineage was steeped in the romanticized history of the American Revolution, a connection he frequently emphasized to craft a personal identity rooted in war and nobility. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and the Michigan Military Academy, graduating in 1895. However, his dream of attending West Point was dashed when he failed the entrance exam, leading him to enlist in the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. His military career was cut short by a heart problem that rendered him ineligible for service, and he was discharged in 1897. Following his discharge, Burroughs drifted through various jobs, including a stint as a cowboy on his brother's ranch during the Chicago influenza epidemic of 1891 and working at his father's battery factory in 1899. It was not until 1911, at the age of 36, after years of low wages as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, that he began writing fiction, driven by a desire to escape his mundane existence and create worlds of his own making.
The Birth of Tarzan and Barsoom
Burroughs's literary career began in 1912 when he submitted a story titled Under the Moons of Mars to Frank Munsey's The All-Story magazine, publishing it under the pseudonym Norman Bean to protect his reputation. This story, which introduced the character John Carter and the planet Mars, which Burroughs called Barsoom, earned him $400, a significant sum at the time. The success of this serialization encouraged him to write full-time, and he soon completed Tarzan of the Apes, which was published from October 1912 and became one of his most successful series. Tarzan was an immediate cultural sensation, and Burroughs was determined to capitalize on this popularity in every possible way, including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, films, and merchandise. Despite expert advice against this course of action, which warned that different media would compete against each other, Burroughs went ahead and proved the experts wrong. The public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered, and the character remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day. In either 1915 or 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named Tarzana. The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their community, Tarzana, California, was formed in 1927. Additionally, the unincorporated community of Tarzan, Texas, was formally named in 1927 when the US Postal Service accepted the name, reputedly coming from the popularity of the first silent Tarzan of the Apes film, starring Elmo Lincoln, and an early Tarzan comic strip.
Burroughs's views on race and eugenics were explicit and deeply embedded in his fiction. He strongly supported eugenics and scientific racism, believing that English nobles made up a particular heritable elite among Anglo-Saxons. Tarzan was meant to reflect these concepts, with him being born to English nobles and then adopted by talking apes, the Mangani. The Mangani express eugenicist views themselves, but Tarzan is permitted to live despite being deemed unfit in comparison and grows up to surpass not only them but black Africans, whom Burroughs clearly presents as inherently inferior. In one Tarzan story, he finds an ancient civilization where eugenics has been practiced for over 2,000 years, with the result that it is free of all crime. Criminal behavior is held to be entirely hereditary, with the solution having been to kill not only criminals but also their families. Lost on Venus, a later novel, presents a similar utopia where forced sterilization is practiced and the unfit are killed. Burroughs explicitly supported such ideas in his unpublished nonfiction essay I See A New Race. Additionally, his Pirate Blood, which is not speculative fiction and remained unpublished after his death, portrayed the characters as victims of their hereditary criminal traits, with one being a descendant of the corsair Jean Lafitte and another from the Jukes family. These views have been compared with Nazi eugenics, though noting that they were popular and common at the time, with Lost on Venus being released the same year the Nazis took power in 1933.
The Man Behind the Myth
Burroughs's personal life was as dynamic as his fiction. He married his childhood sweetheart, Emma Hulbert, in January 1900, and they had three children: Joan (1908, 1972), Hulbert (1909, 1991), and John Coleman Burroughs (1913, 1979), who later became known for his illustrations of his father's books. In the 1920s, Burroughs became a pilot, purchased a Security Airster S-1, and encouraged his family to learn to fly. His daughter Joan married Tarzan film actor James Pierce, and she starred with her husband as the voice of Jane during 1932, 1934 for the Tarzan radio series. Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and in 1935 married the former actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt, who was the former wife of his friend Ashton Dearholt, with whom he had co-founded Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises while filming The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs adopted the Dearholts' two children. He and Florence divorced in 1942. In his late 60s, Burroughs was in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to become a war correspondent, becoming one of the oldest U.S. war correspondents during World War II. This period of his life is mentioned in William Brinkley's bestselling novel Don't Go Near the Water. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on the 19th of March 1950, having written almost 80 novels. He is buried in Tarzana, California, US. At the time of his death, he was believed to have been the writer who had made the most from films, earning over US$2 million in royalties from 27 Tarzan pictures.
The Legacy of the Jungle Lord
Burroughs's influence on literature and popular culture has been profound and enduring. In 2003, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and an impact crater on Mars was named in his honor after his death. Ray Bradbury, in a Paris Review interview, spoke of Burroughs's impact, noting that his work inspired real exploration of Mars. Rudyard Kipling, in Something of Myself, published posthumously in 1937, wrote: My Jungle Books begat Zoos of [imitators]. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes. I read it, but regret I never saw it on the films, where it rages most successfully. He had jazzed the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and get away with, which is a legitimate ambition. By 1963, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction wrote when discussing reprints of several Burroughs novels by Ace Books, an entire generation has grown up inexplicably Burroughs-less. He stated that most of the author's books had been out of print for years and that only the occasional laughable Tarzan film reminded the public of his fiction. Gale reported his surprise that after two decades his books were again available, with Canaveral Press, Dover Publications, and Ballantine Books also reprinting them. Few critical books have been written about Burroughs, but from an academic standpoint, the most helpful are Erling Holtsmark's two books: Tarzan and Tradition and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Stan Galloway's The Teenage Tarzan: A Literary Analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jungle Tales of Tarzan, and Richard Lupoff's two books: Master of Adventure: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision. Galloway was identified by James Edwin Gunn as one of the half-dozen finest Burroughs scholars in the world, and Galloway called Holtsmark his most important predecessor. As of 2025, there exists a significant special collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs' various works at the Oak Park Public Library, consisting of many rare books of his Tarzan, Mucker, Barsoom, Pellucidar, Venus, Caspak, and Moon series, developed due to Burroughs' own connection to the city, being where he wrote several of his first works, those being the Tarzan and Martian stories. Beyond the rare editions, the collection also holds a number of newspaper clippings, ephemera, correspondence between Burroughs and others, as well as various old Tarzan films. Much of the initial collection was gathered during a block party held in 1975 by a group called CHEETAH (Citizens Holding Exercises Extolling Tarzan's Anniversary Here) and compiled by Florence Moyer.