Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in 1875 in Chicago into a comfortable family, and spent his early adult years trying and failing at one career after another. He attended a military academy briefly. He served in the United States Cavalry in Arizona Territory. He worked as a railroad policeman, a gold dredger, a stationery wholesaler, and the manager of a pencil-sharpener company. None of it took. In 1911, in his mid-thirties and effectively broke, he started writing adventure fiction for the pulp magazines because he had read enough of the existing material to believe he could write better.His first sale, in early 1912, was the serial that became A Princess of Mars. Tarzan of the Apes followed within months. By 1914 he was the highest-paid pulp author in the United States. He produced an extraordinary volume of work for the next three decades: roughly twenty-four Tarzan novels, eleven Barsoom novels, the Pellucidar series set inside a hollow Earth, the Venus series, the Caspak trilogy, several Western novels, and dozens of shorter pieces. The Tarzan books in particular created a film and merchandising franchise that has continued in nearly every decade since.He moved to Southern California in 1919, named his estate Tarzana, and the area later became the actual incorporated neighborhood that bears the name. He served as one of the oldest war correspondents in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War. He wrote his final Tarzan novel in 1948. He died in 1950 of a heart attack in Encino, California, reading the Sunday comics at his desk. His prose is not literary in the modern sense, but his world-building changed both science fiction and popular adventure permanently, and the imaginative debt that everyone from Carl Sagan to George Lucas to James Cameron has acknowledged is real.