Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs: From Pencil Sharpeners to Barsoom

In 1911 a thirty-five-year-old wholesaler of pencil sharpeners in Chicago, broke, with a wife, two children and a third coming, was reading the pulp magazines that ran in the back of his trade papers and drew a conclusion that would make him one of the richest authors alive. If people were paid for writing rot such as he was reading, he later recalled thinking, he could write stories just as entertaining. Within eighteen months he had invented Mars and Tarzan.

Every Job Except Writing

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on 1 September 1875, fourth son of Major George Tyler Burroughs, a Civil War veteran turned businessman, and Mary Evaline Zieger. He was shuffled through schools, including Phillips Academy, before graduating from the Michigan Military Academy in 1895. He failed the West Point entrance examination, enlisted in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, and served at Fort Grant in Arizona Territory until a diagnosed heart condition — and his father's political connections — got him out in 1897.

What followed was fifteen years of competent failure. He punched cattle on his brother's Idaho ranch, worked a Chicago battery factory, managed a gold dredge on the Snake River, quit the Oregon Short Line Railroad in 1904, tried shopkeeping and railroad policing and accountancy, and finally spent seven years selling pencil sharpeners at low wages. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900 and spent the decade broke. No part of this résumé suggests a writer; all of it suggests a man who had studied, at close range, what ordinary Americans wanted and could not get.

Norman Bean and the Moons of Mars

He wrote half of a Martian romance and sent it to Thomas Newell Metcalf at *The All-Story*, who told him to finish it. "Under the Moons of Mars" ran from February to July 1912 under the pen name "Normal Bean" — meant to signal that the author's head was screwed on straight — which a typesetter helpfully corrected to "Norman." The magazine paid him $400, and Burroughs called it the first big event in his life. Book publication followed in 1917 as *A Princess of Mars*. Barsoom, his dying red planet of thin air, warring six-limbed green giants, egg-laying princesses and swordsmen who leap in low gravity, was built at pulp speed and has never gone out of use.

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The Ape-Man

*Tarzan of the Apes* appeared in *All-Story* in October 1912 and in book form from A.C. McClurg in 1914. The premise — an English aristocrat's orphaned infant raised by great apes, who teaches himself to read from his dead parents' books before he ever hears human speech — is preposterous and completely watertight as myth. Burroughs wrote twenty-four Tarzan novels among something close to eighty books, and Tarzan became the first mass-media character of the modern kind: a 1918 film with Elmo Lincoln grossed over a million dollars, comic strips ran in more than 250 newspapers by the mid-1930s, and a radio serial cast his own daughter Joan as Jane. By the time he died, twenty-seven Tarzan pictures had paid him more than $2 million in royalties, thought to be the largest film earnings any author had taken.

The Author as Corporation

Advisers warned him that films and comics would cannibalise the books. He ignored them, on the correct theory that the public wanted Tarzan in any form it could get him, and in 1923 did the thing that actually distinguishes him from every other pulp writer of his generation: he incorporated. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. published his own books through the 1930s and licensed the character out itself. He became his own publisher, his own agent and his own merchandising department at a time when authors simply sold rights and hoped. Nearly every modern arrangement by which a franchise character outlives and out-earns its creator's prose descends from that decision.

Tarzana

In 1919 he bought a 550-acre ranch north of Los Angeles and named it after the ape-man. When the surrounding community organised in 1927 the residents voted to take the name too, and Tarzana, California, exists today because a fictional character needed somewhere to live. He learned to fly in the 1920s and bought a Security Airster. In December 1941 he was in Honolulu, aged sixty-six, and applied for accreditation; he covered the Pacific Fleet for United Press as the oldest American war correspondent of the Second World War, until heart attacks sent him home. He died at Encino on 19 March 1950 and was buried at Tarzana.

The Ugly Machinery

None of this can be written without the other half. Burroughs was an explicit supporter of eugenics and scientific racism in fiction and non-fiction alike, and Tarzan was designed to demonstrate them: the foundling's nobility is presented as heritable English blood asserting itself, while Black Africans in the books are drawn as inherently inferior. He imagined societies that had practised eugenics for two millennia and eliminated crime by killing criminals and their families; *Lost on Venus*, published in 1933, offers a utopia of forced sterilisation and the destruction of "the unfit." An unpublished essay, *I See A New Race*, set out the position directly. These views were widely held in his time and are not incidental to his work; they are its structural assumption.

Why Edgar Is Called a Genius

The claim for Burroughs is not literary and his defenders rarely pretend otherwise. Ray Bradbury made the largest version of it in *The Paris Review*, calling Burroughs "probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world" for giving romance and adventure to a whole generation — a wild overstatement that points at something real. Carl Sagan credited the Barsoom books with sending him toward Mars; a Martian crater carries Burroughs's name. Even Kipling, whose *Jungle Books* Tarzan plainly raids, conceded in *Something of Myself* that the younger man had jazzed the motif past him.

The faculty is mythopoeic rather than intellectual: the ability to compress a premise into an image so clean that it survives every retelling, translation and cheapening. A man raised by apes. A soldier who wakes on Mars. Burroughs generated two of the century's most durable myths inside two years, while learning the trade, then had the commercial intelligence to build a company around them.

The counter-case is straightforward. The prose is functional at best and often slack, the plotting repeats, and scholarly attention has been thin. He wrote nearly eighty novels because he wrote fast, not because he wrote well; by 1963 a critic could observe that an entire generation had grown up Burroughs-less, most of the books out of print. Invention on this scale is a real and rare gift, but it is the gift of a myth-maker and a businessman, not a thinker.

Legacy

Burroughs was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003, more than half a century after his death, which is about right: his influence ran through the people who read him at twelve rather than through the critics. Tarzan outlived his author, his politics and most of his sentences, and the corporate machinery he built in 1923 is still turning. The man who could not hold a job for fifteen years ended by inventing the modern franchise.