Edgar Rice Burroughs

Author

• Born: September 1, 1875
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: March 19, 1950
• Place of death: Encino, California

American novelist

Burroughs was one of the most popular authors of the twentieth century. His romantic adventures set in such places as Africa, the center of the earth, and Mars helped shape modern science fiction, and his heroes John Carter of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes have become enduring cultural icons.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

Edgar Rice Burroughs (BUHR-ohz) was the youngest of four surviving sons born to George Tyler Burroughs and Mary Evaline Zeiger Burroughs. George Burroughs had served four years in the Union Army during the Civil War, rising to the rank of brevet major. Following the war, he moved to Chicago and became a prosperous businessman. Edgar Rice Burroughs grew up in comfortable, middle-class surroundings. His family was close-knit and loving. His parents were ambitious for their offspring, and Burroughs’s brothers all graduated from Yale or Harvard while he was a boy. He himself attended private schools until 1891, when an influenza epidemic in Chicago induced his parents to send him to Idaho, where two of his brothers had set themselves up as ranchers. Burroughs’s brief experience in Idaho fired his imagination. The sixteen-year-old boy reveled in his contacts with cowboys, miners, and other colorful characters. He grew proud of his ability to live in a rough world and of his gift for working with horses. This Western idyll came to an abrupt end when Burroughs’s father summoned him home. A new and frustrating epoch in his life would ensue.

George enrolled his son in the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a distinguished preparatory school that readied young men for the Ivy League universities. Though he proved popular with his peers, Burroughs failed to apply himself to his studies and flunked out after one semester. His father next sent him to the Michigan Military Academy, located at Orchard Park, Michigan, where he did better, despite once running away from the school. He graduated with an ambition to attend West Point but failed the entrance examination. Still hoping to win a commission in the Army, Burroughs enlisted in the famous Seventh Cavalry. However, life in the cavalry did not live up to his expectations. By 1896, when Burroughs reported to Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory, the Indian Wars were over. Burroughs and his comrades spent much of their time digging roads. Illness forced Burroughs from the Army but also quashed his hopes of a military career. He returned to Idaho and started a stationery store, which failed within one year. Burroughs soon found himself home in Chicago working for his father. A regular paycheck and the prospect of advancement in his father’s American Battery Company made possible Burroughs’s marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Emma Centennia Hulbert, the daughter of one of Chicago’s most successful hoteliers. However, whatever hopes Burroughs had for the battery business grew dim over the next three years. He felt increasingly suffocated working for his father at a small salary, and, in 1903, he quit.

Life’s Work

Burroughs did not come easily to his vocation as a writer. He fell into a literary career only after suffering a succession of failures in business that forced him to face the prospect of slipping from the middle class into a social netherworld. Burroughs’s life was a series of false starts between 1903 and 1911. He launched a number of businesses, none of which prospered, and worked at a variety of jobs, including a stint as a railroad police officer and a period as a door-to-door salesman. At one point, his fortunes were such that he tried, fruitlessly, to secure a commission in the Chinese army. The one bright spot for Burroughs during these years was a position as manager of the stenographic department at Sears, Roebuck and Company, which he held from 1907 to 1908. Burroughs impressed his superiors, and a secure future seemed ensured. However, he was determined to be his own person and left the company.

By 1911, Burroughs was in dire straits. Now a father, he could barely support his family, and he was forced to pawn his wife’s jewels to meet household expenses. While sitting alone at a borrowed desk with a business marketing pencil sharpeners collapsing around him, Burroughs put pen to paper and, with remarkable ease, composed a wildly imaginative tale of derring-do and romance on the planet Mars. It features the first of his great heroes, John Carter, a former captain in the Confederate Army. Surrounded by Apaches in the Arizona desert, Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars, where he becomes a renowned swordsman and vies for the hand of the Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Burroughs sold the story to Argosy magazine for $400. Eventually published as A Princess of Mars (1912), this novel launched Burroughs as a professional writer.

Burroughs began writing at a furious pace. New novels appeared with dizzying rapidity. One of the earliest proved to be Burroughs’s most enduring achievement as a writer. Tarzan of the Apes debuted as the featured tale in the October, 1912, issue of All-Story magazine. The novel became a sensational success with readers and was published in book form in 1914. As early as 1918, the first of many Tarzan films was released.

Tarzan of the Apes tells the story of a lost scion of the English aristocracy. His parents are marooned on the coast of Africa. When his mother dies and his father is killed by a beast, he is adopted and reared by a tribe of ferocious apes. The boy adjusts to his wild environment by growing up unusually strong, cunning, and courageous. Taking the name Tarzan, he makes himself the “lord of the jungle.” Burroughs’s Tarzan is different in crucial ways from the monosyllabic hero of later films. The Tarzan of the novel teaches himself to read by studying the alphabet blocks and books he finds in his parents’ abandoned cabin. He is a redoubtable linguist who learns to speak French and English in the first novel; before the series ended, Tarzan could also speak German, Latin, and numerous African languages. Once he learns of his heritage, Tarzan is sufficiently adaptable to mix in the wider world as a completely proper English gentleman. However, Tarzan remains most at home in the jungle and proves to be a stern critic of the corruption of civilization.

When queried about his inspiration for the character of Tarzan, Burroughs responded by citing Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and the classical myth of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome who were abandoned and then suckled by a wolf. Tarzan also embodies early twentieth century American concerns about the closing of the West and fears about the pernicious effects of an increasingly urban United States. Tarzan of the Apes is thematically linked to such famous contemporary novels as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903), which celebrated nature and the frontier. An erstwhile Westerner himself, Burroughs used Tarzan and other characters, such as John Carter of Mars, to assuage his own frustrated dreams of rugged adventure. Thus, much of Tarzan’s appeal lies in the character’s expression of the unfulfilled fantasies of both Burroughs and his many readers. Tarzan as a symbol was a spectacular incarnation of the so-called noble savage, of the natural man unspoiled by society’s vices. His attractiveness as an icon made the figure of Tarzan an enduring literary, cultural, and commercial phenomenon throughout the twentieth century.

Burroughs proved himself a shrewd marketer of his writings. This and his prodigious productivity ensured a growing financial security. During World War I, he toyed with various ways of reaching the front but in the end satisfied himself with a commission as captain in the Illinois Reserves. Following the war, Burroughs moved his family permanently to California. He bought a large property in the San Fernando Valley and named it the Tarzana Ranch. Later, Burroughs sold much of this land, and the resulting community, which is actually in the city of Los Angeles, took the name of Tarzana, California.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Burroughs continued his steady stream of books. He experimented with Westerns and the occasional “naturalistic” novel. To satisfy his public, however, Burroughs returned again and again to John Carter’s Mars and the African haunts of Tarzan. He also continued other popular cycles of novels, including the Pellucidar series set in a prehistoric land at the center of the earth and, beginning in the 1930’s, the adventures of Carson Napier of Virginia on the planet Venus.

Burroughs enjoyed his hard-earned affluence. He rode his horses, played tennis and golf, drove powerful automobiles, and, at the age of fifty-eight, learned how to fly an airplane. Unfortunately, prosperity brought tensions at home as his wife, Emma, became addicted to alcohol. In 1934, Burroughs left her and married Florence Dearholt, a family friend, the following year. This marriage also ended in divorce in 1941.

Burroughs moved to Hawaii in 1940 and witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following year. During World War II, he served as a war correspondent in the Pacific. Toward the end of the conflict, Burroughs began to show the strain of his exertions and experienced difficulties with his heart. He moved back to California in 1945. Plagued by health problems, Burroughs wrote little in his last years. He supervised his business affairs and devoted much time to his family. Burroughs died on March 19, 1950.

Significance

Burroughs never achieved literary respectability. His books were virtually ignored by critics and professors of literature. In part, this neglect is justified. Burroughs did not strive for traditional literary immortality. His native talent for writing was stimulated by financial necessity, and he always considered himself a professional wordsmith who wrote for a paycheck and exploited a particular market niche. His attitude toward his work shows in his books. He wrote swiftly, spending little time revising or refining what he had written. Character development and moral nuance were sacrificed to narrative flow. His hurried prose was occasionally clumsy, and, as time went on, his plots grew increasingly repetitious.

Yet despite his many flaws as a writer, Burroughs’s work lives on, long past that of many of his more respected literary contemporaries. Books by Burroughs have been in print almost continuously since his passing. Countless novels and films have been inspired by Burroughs’s creations, and A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes have become popular classics. Burroughs’s books endure because he had a gift for storytelling. He could bring exotic locales to lush and exuberant life and populate them with vivid characters. The best of his books evoke genuine wonder and delight in his readers. Burroughs’s romances of the first decades of the twentieth century helped lay the foundation for the modern literary genres of science fiction and fantasy, and his influence can be read on the shelves of any bookstore. Though his name will rarely be present in academic surveys of American literature, Burroughs remains part of the living texture of American letters.

Bibliography

Cohen, Matt, ed. Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Burroughs met Weston in military school and the two began a lifelong friendship. Cohen, Weston’s great-grandson, discovered a trove of letters, postcards, and other correspondence between the two men dating from 1903 to 1945. The correspondence provides a view of Burroughs’s life and opinions.

DeGraw, Sharon. The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Includes a chapter in which DeGraw analyzes the racial implications of Burroughs’s science fiction.

Fenton, Robert W. The Big Swingers. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. This is a breezy, informal introduction to the life and work of Burroughs with special attention paid to Tarzan. It is as much concerned with the motion pictures as the books. Includes numerous illustrations.

Holtsmark, Erling B. Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Holtsmark’s book is the best introduction to the world of Burroughs, balancing a wealth of information with a judicious critique of Burroughs’s works. Includes an excellent bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. This examination of the classical roots of Tarzan is perhaps the most intellectually ambitious study of Burroughs’s work.

Lupoff, Richard A. Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision. Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1976. This is an extensive critical study of Burroughs’s Martian novels.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. Rev. ed. New York: Ace Books, 1968. Lupoff’s study, the first major critical work on Burroughs, is still well worth reading.

Porges, Irwin. Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975. Porges’s massive biographical study of Burroughs was facilitated by the cooperation of Burroughs’s family. Easily the authoritative work on the subject, the book is extensively illustrated and includes an exhaustive bibliography of Burroughs’s works and an excellent index.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1938-1950: Golden Age of American Science Fiction.