Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, and died on March 19, 1950. He was an American writer known for writing many books in the adventure, science fiction, and fantasy genres. He is best known for creating the character Tarzan, who appeared in 24 books, and John Carter, who appeared in 11 books. He also wrote the Pellucidar series, the Amtor series, and the Caspak trilogy.
Tarzan became very popular quickly. Burroughs used this popularity to create a comic strip, films, and other products. Tarzan is still one of the most successful fictional characters and is a well-known symbol in culture. The ranch where Burroughs lived in California is now the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles, named after the character. Burroughs strongly supported eugenics and scientific racism in both his stories and nonfiction books. The character Tarzan was created to show these ideas.
Biography
Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, as the fourth child of Major George Tyler Burroughs, a businessman and Civil War veteran, and his wife, Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs. His middle name, Edgar, came from his paternal grandmother, Mary Coleman Rice Burroughs.
Burroughs had English and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, with family roots in North America dating back to the Colonial era. Through his Rice grandmother, he was descended from settler Edmund Rice, one of the English Puritans who moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s. He once said, "I can trace my ancestry back to Deacon Edmund Rice." The Burroughs side of his family also had English origins, arriving in Massachusetts around the same time. Many of his ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Some ancestors settled in Virginia during the colonial period, and Burroughs often emphasized his connection to that part of his family, calling it romantic and warlike.
Burroughs attended several local schools, then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and later the Michigan Military Academy. He graduated in 1895 but failed the entrance exam for the United States Military Academy at West Point. Instead, he joined the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. However, he was diagnosed with a heart condition and was not allowed to serve, so he was discharged in 1897.
After leaving the military, Burroughs worked various jobs. During the Chicago influenza epidemic of 1891, he spent six months at his brother’s ranch in Idaho as a cowboy. Later, he worked at his father’s battery factory in Chicago in 1899. He married Emma Hulbert (1876–1944), his childhood sweetheart, in January 1900.
In 1903, Burroughs joined his brothers, George and Harry, who were successful ranchers in southern Idaho and partners in the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company. He managed their Snake River gold dredge, a type of mining machine. The Burroughs brothers were also sixth cousins once removed of famous miner Kate Rice, who became the first female prospector in the Canadian North in 1914. Journalist C. Allen Thorndike Rice was Burroughs’ third cousin.
When the mine failed, the brothers helped Burroughs get a job with the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Salt Lake City. He left the railroad in October 1904.
By 1911, at age 36, after seven years of low-paying work as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, Burroughs began writing fiction. At this time, he and Emma had two children, Joan (1908–1972) and Hulbert (1909–1991). He had plenty of free time and started reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking:
"[…] 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."
In 1913, Burroughs and Emma had their third and final child, John Coleman Burroughs (1913–1979), who later illustrated his father’s books.
In the 1920s, Burroughs became a pilot, bought a Security Airster S-1, and encouraged his family to learn to fly.
His daughter Joan married James Pierce, a Tarzan film actor. She and her husband voiced the characters Jane and Tarzan on a radio series from 1932 to 1934.
Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and married Florence Gilbert Dearholt in 1935. Florence was the former wife of his friend Ashton Dearholt, with whom he co-founded Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises while filming The New Adventures of Tarzan. Burroughs adopted the Dearholts’ two children. He and Florence divorced in 1942.
In his late 60s, Burroughs was in Honolulu when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to become a war correspondent, making him one of the oldest U.S. war correspondents during World War II. This part of his life is described in William Brinkley’s bestselling novel Don’t Go Near the Water.
After the war, Burroughs returned to Encino, California. He struggled with health issues and died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written nearly 80 novels. He is buried in Tarzana, California, U.S.
At the time of his death, he was believed to be the writer who earned the most from films, making over US$2 million in royalties from 27 Tarzan movies.
Burroughs was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2003.
Literary career
Burroughs wrote his stories for pulp magazines, using the name "Norman Bean" to keep his real identity private. His first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was published in The All-Story magazine from February to July 1912. This story began the Barsoom series and introduced the character John Carter. Burroughs earned $400 for this work, which is worth about $11,922 today. The story was later published as a book in 1917 by A. C. McClurg of Chicago, with the title A Princess of Mars. This happened after three Barsoom stories and the first four Tarzan novels had been published as serials.
After Under the Moons of Mars was completed, Burroughs began writing full-time. By that time, he had finished two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, which was published in October 1912 and became one of his most popular series.
Burroughs also wrote science fiction and fantasy stories about Earth explorers traveling to other planets, such as Barsoom (his name for Mars) and Amtor (his name for Venus), as well as to lost islands like Caspak and the interior of the Hollow Earth in his Pellucidar stories. He also wrote Westerns and historical romance stories. Many of his stories appeared in The Argosy magazine, in addition to The All-Story.
When Tarzan of the Apes was first introduced, it became a major cultural success. Burroughs wanted to use this popularity in many ways, such as through comic strips, movies, and merchandise. Experts warned that these different forms of media might compete with each other. However, Burroughs continued with his plans, and the public supported his efforts. Today, Tarzan remains one of the most successful and well-known fictional characters in history.
In 1919, Burroughs bought a large ranch near Los Angeles, California, and named it "Tarzana." When the community around the ranch was officially formed in 1927, it adopted the name Tarzana. A small area in Texas, called Tarzan, was also named in 1927 by the U.S. Postal Service. This name is believed to come from the popularity of the first Tarzan of the Apes film, which starred Elmo Lincoln, and early Tarzan comic strips.
In 1923, Burroughs started his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. He continued to publish his books independently throughout the 1930s.
Reception
Because of the role Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction played in inspiring real exploration of Mars, an impact crater on Mars was named in his honor after his death. In a Paris Review interview, Ray Bradbury said of Burroughs:
"Edgar Rice Burroughs never saw himself as an influential person in society with important responsibilities. However, he may have been the most influential writer in the history of the world. By giving romance and adventure to many young boys, Burroughs inspired them to become successful in their lives."
In Something of Myself (published after his death in 1937), Rudyard Kipling wrote: "My Jungle Books inspired many imitators. But the greatest talent among them was the writer of the Tarzan of the Apes series. I read it, but I regret I never saw it in films, where it was most successful. He took the ideas from the Jungle Books and made them exciting. He once said he wanted to write a bad book and see if he could get away with it, which is a valid goal."
By 1963, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction wrote about reprints of Burroughs’s novels by Ace Books: "An entire generation has grown up without knowing about Burroughs." He noted that most of the author’s books had been unavailable for years, and only the occasional Tarzan film reminded people of his work. Gale expressed surprise that after two decades, Burroughs’s books were again available, with Canaveral Press, Dover Publications, and Ballantine Books reprinting them.
Few books have been written about Burroughs from an academic perspective. The most useful are Erling Holtsmark’s two books: Tarzan and Tradition and Edgar Rice Burroughs; Stan Galloway’s The Teenage Tarzan: A Literary Analysis of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Jungle Tales of Tarzan; and Richard Lupoff’s two books: Master of Adventure: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision. Galloway was recognized by James Edwin Gunn as "one of the half-dozen finest Burroughs scholars in the world." Galloway called Holtsmark his "most important predecessor."
Burroughs supported eugenics and scientific racism. He believed English nobles formed a special hereditary group among Anglo-Saxons. Tarzan was meant to reflect this, as the character was born to English nobles and later raised by talking apes (the Mangani). The Mangani express eugenicist views, but Tarzan is allowed to live despite being considered "unfit" and grows up to surpass them and black Africans, whom Burroughs portrayed as inherently inferior. In one Tarzan story, Tarzan discovers an ancient civilization where eugenics was practiced for over 2,000 years, resulting in a society free of crime. Criminal behavior was believed to be hereditary, with the solution being to kill criminals and their families. In Lost on Venus, a later novel, a similar utopia is described where forced sterilization is practiced, and the "unfit" are killed. Burroughs supported these ideas in his unpublished essay I See A New Race. His book Pirate Blood, which is not speculative fiction and was never published after his death, depicted characters as victims of hereditary criminal traits (one a descendant of the corsair Jean Lafitte, another from the Jukes family). These views have been compared to Nazi eugenics, though they were common at the time. Lost on Venus was published in 1933, the same year the Nazis gained power.
In 2003, Burroughs was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
As of 2025, a significant collection of Burroughs’s works is available at the Oak Park Public Library. The collection includes rare books from his Tarzan, Mucker, Barsoom, Pellucidar, Venus, Caspak, and Moon series. It was developed because Burroughs lived in Oak Park and wrote many of his early works there, including Tarzan and Barsoom stories. In addition to rare editions, the collection includes newspaper clippings, old letters, and early Tarzan films. Much of the original collection was gathered during a block party in 1975 by a group called CHEETAH (Citizens Holding Exercises Extolling Tarzan’s Anniversary Here) and organized by Florence Moyer.
In popular culture
In episode 3 of season 16, titled "The Write Stuff," which aired on September 26, 2022, Adam Butcher plays a character named Burroughs. In the show, this character is known as "Norman Bean." The series, called Murdoch Mysteries, is a Canadian TV show that features detectives solving mysteries set in the past.
Selected works
These three texts have been published by different companies in one or two volumes. This can be confusing because some versions include the original introduction to Part I from the first magazine publication, which was much longer. Other versions use a shorter introduction from the first book publication, which had all three parts under the title The Moon Maid.