Edgar Rice Burroghs Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, to George Tyler Burroughs, a Civil War veteran and businessman, and Mary Evaline Burroughs. Raised in a family that valued discipline and practical success, he experienced both the expectations of a prominent father and the restlessness that would mark his early years. He attended several schools, including a brief and unsuccessful stint at Phillips Academy in Andover, before finding a better fit at the Michigan Military Academy in Orchard Lake. There he developed a taste for structure, horsemanship, and storytelling, and after graduation he even returned for a time as an instructor.

Struggles and Early Work
Hoping for a military career, Burroughs tried for West Point, but failed the entrance exam. He enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry and served in the Arizona Territory, only to be discharged for medical reasons. The setback began a long period of odd jobs across the American West and Midwest: ranch work, bookkeeping, and sales positions that never quite stuck. In Chicago he worked for and around his father's business interests and others, often managing accounts or taking on sales routes. In 1900 he married Emma Hulbert, whose steadying presence and belief in his abilities sustained him through lean years. They would have three children: Joan, Hulbert, and John Coleman. As his responsibilities grew, the family's finances often hovered on the edge, and Burroughs read voraciously in spare moments, filling his imagination with frontier yarns, science, and adventure fiction.

Breakthrough in Pulp Magazines
By 1911 Burroughs decided he could write stories at least as entertaining as the ones he found in cheap magazines. He sent a long romance of interplanetary adventure to The All-Story magazine. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf accepted it, and the serial ran in 1912 as Under the Moons of Mars, credited to the pseudonym Norman Bean. It introduced John Carter of Mars and launched the Barsoom series, a heady mixture of planetary romance, swashbuckling combat, and exotic cultures. Encouraged by this success, he submitted Tarzan of the Apes to the same magazine later that year. The tale of an orphaned aristocrat raised by apes in Africa became an immediate sensation with readers and editors alike. Book publishers, including A. C. McClurg under editor Joseph Bray, moved quickly to bring his magazine work into hardcover, giving him durable visibility far beyond the pulps.

Tarzan and Literary Expansion
Tarzan dominated Burroughs's career, spawning dozens of sequels that explored jungle adventure, lost civilizations, and the collision between nature and modernity. Yet Burroughs did not confine himself to one world. He built interconnected cycles that let him range widely: Barsoom (Mars), Pellucidar (a prehistoric world inside the Earth), the Caspak trilogy begun with The Land That Time Forgot, and later Venus novels. Illlustrator J. Allen St. John gave his fiction a visual identity with dynamic covers and interior plates that imprinted Burroughs's heroes and creatures on popular imagination. Burroughs wrote quickly and compulsively, shaping a voice that favored momentum, cliffhangers, and clear moral stakes over careful realism, and he delivered what his readers wanted with remarkable consistency.

Business, Hollywood, and Comics
Burroughs treated his writing as a business as much as an art. In 1923 he established Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., gaining control over his copyrights and licensing. He purchased a ranch in the San Fernando Valley and called it Tarzana; the surrounding community eventually adopted that name. Hollywood seized on Tarzan as a bankable figure, beginning with silent films starring Elmo Lincoln and continuing into the sound era with Johnny Weissmuller's hugely popular portrayals opposite Maureen O'Sullivan. Producers and studios, from early independents to major outfits like MGM, turned to Tarzan for reliable returns. On radio, his son-in-law James Pierce, who had also portrayed Tarzan on screen, voiced the character alongside Burroughs's daughter Joan, who played Jane, bringing the property into American living rooms in the early 1930s. In newspapers, the Tarzan comic strip began under artist Hal Foster and later flourished under Burne Hogarth, expanding the character's reach and visual vocabulary.

Family and Personal Turns
Burroughs's home life was intertwined with his enterprise. Emma Hulbert helped keep the household steady during his climb from obscurity to fame. Their children often lived within the orbit of the family business: Joan not only acted opposite James Pierce but also worked on projects connected to her father's creations; Hulbert contributed photography and logistics; and John Coleman became an artist who illustrated some of his father's work. In the mid-1930s, after Edgar and Emma divorced, he married actress Florence Gilbert, formerly married to Ashton Dearholt, a film producer who had collaborated with Burroughs on Tarzan screen ventures. The new marriage brought both companionship and further entanglement with Hollywood; it also ended in divorce several years later, leaving Burroughs to balance family needs with his thriving but demanding franchise.

War Years and Later Life
Burroughs moved to Hawaii around 1940, where he lived near family and continued to write. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he sought accreditation as a war correspondent and, already in his mid-sixties, became one of the oldest correspondents in the Pacific theater. He filed columns that blended reportage with the lucid, energetic prose his readers recognized, chronicling soldiers' routines, air missions, and the strain of wartime life. The experience rekindled the sense of adventure and duty that had animated his youth. After the war he returned to California, continued to oversee Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and tended to his prolific backlist, reprints, and new editions that kept his characters in circulation for new generations of readers.

Legacy
Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950 in California, leaving behind one of the most recognizable heroic figures in modern culture and a library of adventure that helped define American popular fiction. Through persistent negotiation with editors such as Thomas Newell Metcalf, sustained relationships with publishers like A. C. McClurg, and collaborations with artists and performers including J. Allen St. John, Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth, Elmo Lincoln, Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, James Pierce, and Joan Burroughs, he built a multimedia empire before the term existed. His stories offered velocity, wonder, and clear moral purpose, inspiring readers to imagine uncharted jungles, hidden worlds, and distant planets. The institution he founded, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., safeguarded his creations and maintained their presence in books, comics, radio, film, and later television. The community of Tarzana bears the name of his most famous character, a reminder that a restless Chicagoan with a head full of stories transformed pulp pages into a durable mythos that continues to echo across popular culture.

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