Edgar_Rice_Burroughs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Edgar Rice Burroughs Edgar Rice Burroughs Edgar Rice Burroughs Biography Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois (although he later lived for many years in the neighboring suburb of Oak Park), the son of a businessman. He was educated at a number of local schools, and during the Chicago influenza epidemic in 1891 spent a half year on his brothers’ ranch on the Raft River in Idaho. He then attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for West Point, he ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus found ineligible for a commission, he was discharged in 1897.[1] Born Died Occupation Nationality Writing period Genres September 1, 1875(1875-09-01) Chicago, Illinois, United States March 19, 1950 (aged 74) Encino, California, United States Novelist American 20th century Adventure novel, Lost World, Sword and Planet, Planetary Romance, Soft science fiction, Westerns Tarzan series, Barsoom series Notable work(s) Influences H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edwin Lester Linden Arnold Influenced Robert E. Howard, A. Merritt, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Michael Moorcock, Lin Carter, Leigh Brackett, John Norman, Otis Adelbert Kline Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres. Typsescript letter, with Tarzana Ranch letterhead, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ruthven Deane, explaining the design and significance of his bookplate What followed was a string of seemingly unrelated and short stint jobs. Following a period of drifting and ranch 1 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Edgar Rice Burroughs probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines." Aiming his work at these pulp fiction magazines, his first story "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912[4][5] and earned Burroughs US$400 (roughly the equivalent of US$7600 in 2004). Burroughs soon took up writing full-time and by the time the run of Under the Moons of Mars had finished he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, which was published from October 1912 and went on to begin his most successful series. In 1913, Burroughs and Emma had their third and last child, John Coleman. Burroughs also wrote popular science fiction and fantasy stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs’ fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories, as well as westerns and historical romances. Along with All-Story, many of his stories were published in the Argosy Magazine. Tarzan was a cultural sensation when introduced. Burroughs was determined to capitalize on Tarzan’s popularity in every way possible. He planned to exploit Tarzan through several different media including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, movies and merchandise. Experts in the field advised against this course of action, stating that the different media would just end up competing against each other. Burroughs went ahead, however, and proved the experts wrong—the public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon. In 1919 Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California which he named "Tarzana." The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their town was incorporated in 1928. And the unincorporated community of Tarzan, Texas was formally named in 1927 when the postal service accepted the name[6], reputedly coming from the popularity of the first (silent) "Tarzan of the Apes" film, starring Elmo Lincoln, and an early "Tarzan" comic strip. In 1923 Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. He divorced Emma in 1934 and married former actress Florence Gilbert Dearholt in 1935, ex-wife of his friend, Ashton Dearholt, adopting the Dearholts’ two children. They divorced in 1942.[7] At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor he was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late sixties, he asked for permission to be a war correspondent. This permission was granted and so he became one of the oldest war correspondent for the U.S. during World War II. After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Bookplate of Edgar Rice Burroughs showing Tarzan holding the planet Mars, surrounded by other characters from Burroughs’ stories and symbols relating to his personal interests and career work in Idaho, Burroughs found work at his father’s firm in 1899. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work, initially in Idaho but soon back in Chicago.[2] By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan and Hulbert.[3] During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines and has since claimed: "...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 2 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Encino, California, where, after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written almost seventy novels.[8] The towns of Tarzana, California and Tarzan, Texas were named after Tarzan. The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs’ honor. • • • • • • • • • • • • • Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1927, 1928) Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1928) Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929) Tarzan the Invincible (1930. 1931) Tarzan Triumphant (1931) Tarzan and the City of Gold (1932) Tarzan and the Lion Man (1933, 1934) Tarzan and the Leopard Men (1935) Tarzan’s Quest (1935, 1936) Tarzan and the Forbidden City (1938) Tarzan the Magnificent (1936, 1937) Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (1947) Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins (1963, for younger readers) • Tarzan and the Madman (1964) • Tarzan and the Castaways (1965) • Tarzan: the Lost Adventure (with Joe R. Lansdale) (1995) Selected bibliography Barsoom series • A Princess of Mars (1912) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [1]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Gods of Mars (1914) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[2]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Warlord of Mars (1918) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[3]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[4]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Chessmen of Mars (1922) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[5]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Master Mind of Mars (1928) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[6]) • A Fighting Man of Mars (1931) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[7]) • Swords of Mars (1936) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[8]) • Synthetic Men of Mars (1940) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[9]) • Llana of Gathol (1948) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[10]) • John Carter of Mars (1964) • "John Carter and the Giant of Mars" (1940) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[11]) Actually written by Burroughs’s son, John Coleman Burroughs. • "Skeleton Men of Jupiter" (1942) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[12]) Pellucidar series • At the Earth’s Core (1914) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [21]) • Pellucidar (1923) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [22]) • Tanar of Pellucidar (1928) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [23]) • Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929) • Back to the Stone Age (1937) • Land of Terror (1944) • Savage Pellucidar (1963) Venus series • • • • • Pirates of Venus (1934) Lost on Venus (1935) Carson of Venus (1939) Escape on Venus (1946) The Wizard of Venus (1970) Tarzan series • Tarzan of the Apes (1912) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[13]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Return of Tarzan (1913) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[14]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book, project) • The Beasts of Tarzan (1914) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[15]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • The Son of Tarzan (1914) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[16]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[17]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • Jungle Tales of Tarzan (1916, 1917) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[18]) (LibriVox.org Audio Book) • Tarzan the Untamed (1919, 1921) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[19]) • Tarzan the Terrible (1921) (Project Gutenberg Entry:[20]) • Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1922, 1923) • Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) Caspak series • The Land That Time Forgot (1918) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [24]) • The People That Time Forgot (1918) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [25]) (AKA "People Out of Time") • Out of Time’s Abyss (1918) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [26]) Moon series • The Moon Maid (1926) (aka The Moon Men) • Part I: The Moon Maid • Part II: The Moon Men • Part III: The Red Hawk These three texts have been published by various houses in one or two volumes. Adding to the confusion, some editions have the original (significantly longer) introduction to Part I from the first publication as a magazine 3 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia • The Lad and the Lion (1938) Edgar Rice Burroughs Western novels • • • • Apache Devil (1933) The Bandit of Hell’s Bend (1926) The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County (1940) The War Chief (1927) Historical novels • I am a Barbarian (1967) • The Outlaw of Torn (1927) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [34]) Other works • The Efficiency Expert (1921) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [35]) • Forgotten Tales of Love and Murder (2001) (publisher link) • The Girl from Farris’s (1916) • The Girl from Hollywood (1923) • The Mad King (1926) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [36]) • Marcia of the Doorstep (1999) • Minidoka: 937th Earl of One Mile Series M (1998) • Pirate Blood (1970) • The Rider (1937) • You Lucky Girl! (1999) Book Cover: Pirates of Venus serial, and others have the shorter version from the first book publication, which included all three parts under the title The Moon Maid.[9] Popular culture • In the video game Jurassic Park: Trespasser there is a statue of E. R. Burroughs, possibly as a reference to his novel The Land That Time Forgot. • In Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, several different fictional Martian races appear, including a people who are a combination of the Red Martians of Edgar Rice Burroughs and those by Ray Bradbury, and another who are unmistakably Burroughs’ big fierce Green Martians. • In the Mars Trilogy novels of Kim Stanley Robinson the original capital city on Mars is named Burroughs as a sort of tribute. It is later flooded. • Season 1, Episode 29 of Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan animated series, Tarzan and the Mysterious Visitor, illustrates Burroughs as a struggling writer who travels to Africa in search of inspiration for a new novel (actually, Burroughs never set foot in Africa). In the cartoon he is called "Ed." • The 1980 novel The Number of the Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein featured characters named Zebediah John Carter, Jacob Burroughs, and Dejah Thoris Burroughs in homage to Burroughs’ Mars novels. Among other things, these and the other main characters travel to various alternate universes, including Barsoom, Oz and Wonderland. The protagonist of Heinlein’s Glory Road muses on Barsoom in one passage. Mucker series • The Mucker (1914) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [27]) • The Return of the Mucker (1916) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [28]) • The Oakdale Affair (1917) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [29]) Other science fiction • Beyond the Farthest Star (1941) (Project Gutenberg (AU) Entry: [30]) • The Lost Continent (1916) (aka Beyond Thirty) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [31]) • The Monster Men (1929) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [32]) • The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw (1937) (Project Gutenberg Entry: [33]) Jungle adventure novels • • • • The Man-Eater (1915) The Cave Girl (1925) The Eternal Lover (1925) (aka The Eternal Savage) Jungle Girl (1932) (aka Land of the Hidden Men) 4 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia • The Marvel Comics book Excalibur created by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis paid a tribute to the John Carter stories in issue #16 and 17. The story was billed on the cover of issue #16 as "Kurt Wagner Warlord of ?". The series added a further tribute with issue #60 and the story "Braddock of the jungle". • In The Alternate Martians (Ace, 1965) A. Bertram Chandler explored a fictional Mars curiously combining characters, including Deliah (for Dejah) Thoris and Tars Tarkas, and characteristics of Burroughs’s Barsoom with the malevolent Martians of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. • In Frank Frazetta’s Creatures published by the Frazetta Comics imprint at Image Burroughs appears as a member of a group of supernatural investigators led by former US president Theodore Roosevelt. • In Rocky II, Rocky reads "The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County" to Adrian while she is in a coma. • In the TV series ER, the character played by Noah Wyle is usually called simply Carter, but his full name is John Carter. The creator of ER, Michael Crichton, has cited the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs as an early influence, thus this homage. Edgar Rice Burroughs References [1] [2] [3] [4] Slotkin, Richard (1998). Gunfighter Nation. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 196. ISBN 0806130318. Holtsmark, Erling B. (1986). Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twain Publishers. p. 3-4. ISBN 0-8057-7459-9. Holtsmark, Erling B. (1986). Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twain Publishers. p. 5. ISBN 0-8057-7459-9. ERBzine, Volume 0419 -"A Virtual Visit to The Nell Dismukes McWhorter Memorial Edgar Rice Burroughs Collection", with photographs. Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue Holtsmark, Erling B. (1986). Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twain Publishers. p. 9-10. ISBN 0-8057-7459-9. Holtsmark, Erling B. (1986). Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twain Publishers. p. 12-13. ISBN 0-8057-7459-9. Holtsmark, Erling B. (1986). Edgar Rice Burroughs. Boston: Twain Publishers. p. 13-15. ISBN 0-8057-7459-9. ERBzine [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] External links • Tarzan.com • Tarzan.org • Edgar Rice Burroughs Web Museum and Weekly Online Fanzine • Works by Edgar Rice Burroughs at Project Gutenberg • Works by Edgar Rice Burroughs at Project Gutenberg Australia • Official biography of Burroughs • Bibliography on SciFan • LibriVox Audiobook Recordings • Edgar Rice Burroughs at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database • Works by Edgar Rice Burroughs Persondata NAME ALTERNATIVE NAMES SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist DATE OF BIRTH PLACE OF BIRTH DATE OF DEATH PLACE OF DEATH September 1, 1875(1875-09-01) Chicago, Illinois, United States March 19, 1950 Encino, California, United States Burroughs, Edgar Rice Books on Edgar Rice Burroughs • Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Richard A. Lupoff • Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan by John Taliaferro • Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by the Rev. Henry Hardy Heins • Tarzan Alive by Philip Jose Farmer • Burroughs’s Science Fiction by Robert R. Kudlay and Joan Leiby • Tarzan and Tradition and Edgar Rice Burroughs by Erling B. Holtsmark • Edgar Rice Burroughs by Irwin Porges • Edgar Rice Burroughs by Robert B. Zeuschner • The Burroughs Cyclopædia ed. by Clark A. Brady • A Guide to Barsoom by John Flint Roy See also • • • • • Mars in fiction Otis Adelbert Kline Sword and planet John Carter of Mars film Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Rice_Burroughs" 5 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Edgar Rice Burroughs Categories: 1875 births, 1950 deaths, Edgar Rice Burroughs, American fantasy writers, American science fiction writers, Writers from California, People from Chicago, Illinois, People from Oak Park, Illinois, Phillips Academy alumni, Pulp fiction, Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Tarzan, United States Army soldiers, Writers from Chicago, Illinois, English Americans This page was last modified on 17 May 2009, at 20:20 (UTC). All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.) Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a U.S. registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity. Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers 6