Edgar Rice Burroughs
In 1891, at the age of fifteen, Burroughs spent six months in Idaho on the cattle ranch owned by two of his brothers, George and Harry. On his return from Idaho he was sent to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from where he was expelled, and then on to the Michigan Military Academy.
Burroughs followed his father, who was a civil war veteran, into a military career. He joined the 7th United States Cavalry as a private after failing the entrance exams for West Point. This career was cut short in 1897 when Burroughs was diagnosed with a heart murmur.
For the next fourteen years Burroughs tried a series of jobs in Idaho and Chicago but without much success. While working for his father’s American Battery Company in 1900, Burroughs married Emma Centennia Hulbert. By 1911, with a wife and two children to support, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler in Chicago.
It was at this point in his life that Burroughs found success as a writer. His first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was serialized from February to July 1912 in All-Story magazine and earned him $400.
By the time the final instalment was published, Burroughs had written two more stories. The second of these, Tarzan of the Apes, appeared in All-Story magazine in October 1912. Two years later it was published as a book, the first of twenty-six in the Tarzan series.
So began a prolific writing career. As well as the Tarzan novels, Burroughs wrote book series set on Venus and Mars, horror stories, westerns, tales of prehistoric man (including The Land That Time Forgot) and the Pellucidar series starting with At the Earth’s Core.
Tarzan made his first appearance on cinema screens in 1918 in a silent film with Elmo Lincoln playing the title role. But his first words were spoken by Johnny Weissmuller in the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man.
The success of his books enabled Burroughs to purchase a ranch north of Los Angeles in 1919. He named it Tarzana and, in 1928, the inhabitants of the community that grew up around the ranch adopted the same name for their town.
In 1923 Burroughs decided to set up Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and employ himself as a writer. He started publishing his own novels from 1931 starting with Tarzan the Invincible.
After divorcing Emma in 1934, he married Florence Dearholt the following year. In 1940 they moved to Hawaii where they were living when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. At sixty-six Burroughs was too old to fight during the Second World War but he became the oldest war correspondent in the South Pacific, writing for the Los Angeles Times.
After the war Burroughs returned to California alone, having divorced Florence in 1942. He died at his home in Encino on 19 March 1950.
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