Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was the most successful manufacturer of adventure fiction in the history of American popular literature — a writer of no particular literary distinction whose two great creations, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, achieved a cultural penetration so deep and so lasting that they transcended their origins in pulp magazines to become permanent fixtures of the global imagination. Burroughs published over seventy novels, nearly all of them adventure stories set in exotic or fantastic locales, and at the peak of his career in the 1920s and 1930s he was arguably the most widely read author in the world.

An Unlikely Origin

Burroughs’s path to authorship was spectacularly unpromising. Born in 1875 in Chicago to a prosperous family, he was educated at private schools and the Michigan Military Academy but failed to gain admission to West Point. He enlisted in the US Cavalry and was posted to Fort Grant, Arizona, where he discovered he had no aptitude for military life. Over the next fifteen years, he drifted through a series of failed business ventures: he sold electric light bulbs, mined gold in Idaho, ran a stationery store, and worked as a railroad policeman. By 1911, at the age of thirty-five, he was married, had children, and was nearly destitute.

What he did have was a voracious reading habit, particularly for the adventure fiction published in the pulp magazines of the era. Looking at the stories in All-Story Magazine, he concluded — with a bluntness that he freely admitted — that he could write material at least as bad as what was being published, and that it might pay better than his current employment. He was right on both counts.

Tarzan of the Apes

Tarzan of the Apes was serialised in All-Story Magazine in October 1912 and published as a novel by A.C. McClurg in 1914. The story — an English aristocrat’s infant son raised by great apes in the African jungle, who discovers his noble heritage and must choose between civilisation and wilderness — was an immediate sensation. Burroughs had stumbled onto one of the great mythic templates: the noble savage, the lost child, the man between two worlds.

Tarzan’s appeal was visceral and universal. He represented an idealised version of masculinity — physically perfect, morally uncorrupted, capable of extraordinary violence but also of tenderness and nobility. The character tapped into anxieties about civilisation and masculinity that were widespread in early twentieth-century America, and into fantasies of escape from the constraints of modern urban life. Burroughs was not a sophisticated thinker about these themes, but his instinct for mythic storytelling was unerring.

The Tarzan series eventually encompassed twenty-four novels, published between 1912 and 1947, along with innumerable film adaptations beginning with Tarzan of the Apes (1918). The 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man, starring Johnny Weissmuller, established the character’s image — the loincloth, the yodel, the vine-swinging — in popular culture, though Burroughs’s Tarzan was considerably more articulate and civilised than the monosyllabic movie version.

The Barsoom Series

Burroughs’s second great creation was John Carter of Mars, introduced in Under the Moons of Mars (serialised 1912, published as A Princess of Mars in 1917). Carter, a Confederate veteran mysteriously transported to Mars (called Barsoom by its inhabitants), discovers a dying planet of warring civilisations, monstrous creatures, and a beautiful princess, Dejah Thoris, whom he must rescue. The series — eleven novels in total — essentially invented the genre that would later be called planetary romance or science fantasy.

The Gods of Mars (1913) and The Warlord of Mars (1914) continued Carter’s adventures with escalating inventiveness, and the Barsoom novels collectively influenced virtually every subsequent writer of science fiction adventure, from Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury to George Lucas, whose Star Wars franchise owes an enormous debt to Burroughs’s formula of exotic alien worlds, swashbuckling heroes, and imperilled princesses.

Other Series and the Burroughs Factory

Burroughs’s productivity was industrial. Beyond Tarzan and Barsoom, he created the Pellucidar series (adventures at the Earth’s core, beginning with At the Earth’s Core, 1914), the Venus series (Carson Napier on Amtor), the Caspak trilogy (The Land That Time Forgot, 1918), and numerous standalone adventure novels. The quality was wildly uneven — many of the later Tarzan novels are formulaic to the point of self-parody — but Burroughs maintained a level of narrative energy and inventiveness that kept readers coming back.

He was also a shrewd businessman. He incorporated himself as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. in 1923, one of the first authors to treat his literary properties as a business enterprise. He retained merchandising and licensing rights with unusual tenacity, and the Burroughs estate continues to manage his intellectual property. The community of Tarzana, California, is named after his ranch.

Critical Assessment

Burroughs has never been taken seriously as a literary artist, and by conventional literary standards this judgment is fair. His prose is functional at best, his characterisation is two-dimensional, his treatment of race and gender reflects the worst prejudices of his era, and his plots are repetitive — the hero captured, the heroine imperilled, the villain defeated, repeated with variations across dozens of novels.

But literary quality was never the source of Burroughs’s power. His achievement was mythopoeic: he created characters and worlds that lodged in the collective imagination with a force that transcended the limitations of the individual books. Tarzan and John Carter are cultural archetypes that have been reinterpreted by every subsequent generation, and their creator’s influence on popular entertainment — from pulp fiction to comic books to film to video games — is incalculable.

Collecting Burroughs

Burroughs first editions are among the most actively collected in the science fiction and adventure fiction fields. Tarzan of the Apes (A.C. McClurg, 1914) in first edition is the primary target, with fine copies commanding five-figure prices. The dust jacket, featuring a scene of Tarzan and Kala, is crucial to value. A Princess of Mars (A.C. McClurg, 1917) is nearly as desirable. The McClurg first editions of the early Tarzan and Barsoom novels are all collected, with values declining steeply for later series entries. Burroughs pulp magazine appearances — particularly the first serialisations of Tarzan of the Apes and Under the Moons of Mars in All-Story Magazine — are extremely scarce and valuable. The field has an active collector community and extensive bibliographic scholarship.