A failed pencil-sharpener salesman read pulp magazines and decided to invent Tarzan
By 36, Edgar Rice Burroughs had flopped as a soldier, gold miner and railway clerk and was selling pencil sharpeners wholesale. Reading pulp magazines in his idle hours, he concluded he could write stories at least as rotten and probably more entertaining. The result was Tarzan, and a Los Angeles neighbourhood now bears the name.
Born in Chicago in September 1875, the fourth son of a businessman and Civil War veteran, Burroughs took his middle name from a grandmother descended from the Puritan settler Edmund Rice. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover and then the Michigan Military Academy, graduating in 1895, but flunked the West Point entrance exam. He enlisted with the 7th Cavalry in Arizona Territory, only for a heart problem to end his service in 1897.
Years of drifting followed: cowboy work on a brother's Idaho ranch, a job at his father's battery factory, a doomed gold dredge on the Snake River in 1903, and a railroad post in Salt Lake City that he quit in October 1904. He married Emma Hulbert in 1900, and they had three children, including John Coleman Burroughs, who later illustrated his father's books.
Once he started writing around 1911, the output was staggering: almost 80 novels, including twenty-four Tarzan books and eleven featuring John Carter of Mars, plus the Pellucidar, Amtor and Caspak series. He milked Tarzan's success through a syndicated comic strip, films and merchandise, and by his death was thought to be the author who had earned most from cinema, collecting over 2 million dollars in royalties from 27 Tarzan pictures. His California ranch became the heart of Tarzana. He also openly promoted eugenics and scientific racism, ideas he meant Tarzan to embody.
His personal life stayed eventful. He learned to fly in the 1920s and bought a Security Airster S-1. His daughter Joan married Tarzan actor James Pierce and voiced Jane on the radio from 1932 to 1934. He divorced Emma in 1934 and married Florence Gilbert Dearholt the next year, a marriage that ended in 1942. In his late sixties he was in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked and became one of the oldest American war correspondents of World War II. He died of a heart attack in Encino on March 19, 1950, and was buried in Tarzana.
Source: Edgar Rice Burroughs
