Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Edgar Rice Burroughs

Born September 1, 1875(1875-09-01)
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died March 19, 1950 (aged 74)
Encino, California, United States
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Writing period 20th century
Genres Adventure novel, Lost World, Sword and Planet, Planetary Romance, Soft science fiction, Westerns
Notable work(s) Tarzan series, Barsoom series
Influences
Influenced

Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois (although he later lived for many years in the neighboring suburb of Oak Park), the son of a businessman. He was educated at a number of local schools, and during the Chicago influenza epidemic in 1891 spent a half year on his brothers' ranch on the Raft River in Idaho. He then attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for West Point, he ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus found ineligible for a commission, he was discharged in 1897.

What followed was a string of seemingly unrelated and short stint jobs. Following a period of drifting and ranch work in Idaho, Burroughs found work at his father's firm in 1899. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work, initially in Idaho but soon back in Chicago.

By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan and Hulbert. During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines and has since claimed:

"...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."

Aiming his work at these pulp fiction magazines, his first story "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912[1][2] and earned Burroughs US$400 (roughly the equivalent of US$7600 in 2004).

Burroughs soon took up writing full-time and by the time the run of Under the Moons of Mars had finished he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, which was published from October 1912 and went on to begin his most successful series. In 1913, Burroughs and Emma had their third and last child, John Coleman.

Burroughs also wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs' fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories, as well as westerns and historical romances. Along with All-Story, many of his stories were published in the Argosy Magazine.

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.

In 1923 Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. He divorced Emma in 1934 and married former actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt in 1935, ex-wife of his friend, Ashton Dearholt, adopting the Dearholts' two children. They divorced in 1942.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor he was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late sixties, he asked for permission to be a war correspondent. This permission was granted and so he became the oldest war correspondent 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.

The town of Tarzana, California was named after Tarzan. In 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 town was incorporated in 1928.

The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Barsoom series

Main article: Barsoom

[edit] Tarzan series

Main article: Tarzan

[edit] Pellucidar series

Main article: Pellucidar
Book Cover: Pirates of Venus
Book Cover: Pirates of Venus

[edit] Venus series

Main article: Venus series

[edit] Caspak series

[edit] Moon series

  • The Moon Maid (1926) (aka The Moon Men)
    • Part I: The Moon Maid, Part II: The Moon Men and Part III: The Red Hawk have been published in varying combinations. Like most of Burroughs fiction, they were originally published serially, but the original book version included all three under the title The Moon Maid.[3]

[edit] Mucker series

[edit] Other science fiction

[edit] Jungle adventure novels

[edit] Western novels

  • Apache Devil (1933)
  • The Bandit of Hell's Bend (1926)
  • The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County (1940)
  • The War Chief (1927)

[edit] Historical novels

[edit] Other works

[edit] Popular Culture

  • In chapter 16 of Stephen King's novel Desperation can be found the line "The Farting Buzzards of Desperation. Sounds like a goddam Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, doesn't it?" (Such adjective-noun-noun titles are actually a rarity among Burrough's novels; the closest analogue would be The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County.)
  • Season 1, Episode 29 of Disney's The Legend of Tarzan animated series, Tarzan and the Mysterious Visitor, illustrates Burroughs as a struggling writer who travels to Africa in search of inspiration for a new novel.
  • The 1980 novel The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein featured characters named Zebediah John Carter, Jacob Burroughs, and Dejah Thoris Burroughs in homage to Burroughs' Mars novels. Among other things, these and the other main characters travel to various alternate universes, including Barsoom, Oz and Wonderland.

[edit] See also

United States Army Portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ ERBzine, Volume 0419 -"A Virtual Visit to The Nell Dismukes McWhorter Memorial Edgar Rice Burroughs Collection", with photographs.
  2. ^ Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue
  3. ^ ERBzine

[edit] External links

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:


Persondata
NAME Burroughs, Edgar Rice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1875(1875-09-01)
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago, Illinois, United States
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1950
PLACE OF DEATH Encino, California, United States