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Edgar Rice Burroughs
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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.
oughs 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.
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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.
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.
What followed was a string of seemingly unrelated and short stint jobs. Following a period of drifting and ranch 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.
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. 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 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 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, 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.
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 Encino, California, where, after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written almost seventy novels.
The towns of Tarzana, California and Tarzan, Texas were named after Tarzan. The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor.
Influence and literary merit
Influence on Science Fiction Writers
Burroughs's work has had an influence on many science fiction and fantasy writers, including H. P. Lovecraft (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath), Robert E. Howard (Almuric), Leigh Brackett (especially her novels and novellas set on Mars and Venus), Lin Carter (a significant number of overt pastiches), and Ray Bradbury, who have exerted a considerable influence of their own on the science fiction and fantasy genres. Brackett and Bradbury actually collaborated on the famous 1946 Burroughs-derivative novella Lorelei of the Red Mist. In addition, fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, who co-wrote the screenplay for the 1975 film adaptation of The Land That Time Forgot, in 1965-66 released a trilogy of Burroughs pastiches, Warriors of Mars, Blades of Mars, and Barbarians of Mars under the telling pseudonym "Edward P. Bradbury".
Plots
Certainly the most evident feature of Burroughs's novels is their frequently formulaic nature. There are plentiful mad scientists and mad queens, strong but honorable heroes, and a nearly certain guarantee that the hero of any novel will fall in love with a woman who sooner or later turns out to be a princess. Unlike a lot of recent fiction, the main characters are never equivocal about their good or bad natures. While the plot structures are therefore predictable, they are nevertheless satisfying, accounting in large measure for their continuing success. There is a Horatio Alger-like implication that honesty, courage, and hard work will eventually succeed (e.g., John Carter's frequent exclamation, "I still live!") and that scheming, avarice, hatred, and laziness will not. And even this formulaic nature, not original with but perfected by Burroughs, has had a host of imitators, right through to the Star Wars films, which include many of the famous Burroughs tropes, such as the princess in distress (Princess Leia) rescued by the hero.
Style
Burroughs will never be lifted up as a great prose stylist; certainly the Mars of his finest successors - C. S. Lewis (who acknowledges in the preface to Out of the Silent Planet his debt to pulp science fiction writers, though he does not name Burroughs specifically), Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), and Frederick Turner (A Double Shadow and Genesis: An Epic Poem) - are described with a poetic eloquence that he never matched even briefly. Nevertheless his descriptions of anciently abandoned cities succumbing to the deserts of dying Mars or the grandly upswinging horizon of Pellucidar, for example, create a lasting impression and account in no small measure for his enduring popularity. And, more than lacking the scholarly rigor of contemporary authors like Ben Bova and Kim Stanley Robinson, Burroughs did not hesitate to sweep scientific fact out of the way of a good story; still, his inventiveness (the atmosphere plants striving to maintain the dissipating atmosphere on Mars come to mind, or the ring of planets in the same orbital plane in Beyond the Farthest Star) was not lacking in intelligent creativity.
Critics have often derided Burroughs, not unfairly, as in main an author of mere hastily written escapist fantasy, and certainly the world would be little the poorer without such shabby efforts as Synthetic Men of Mars, The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County, and The Monster Men. But some scholars, most notably Richard A. Lupoff, have pointed to the stories in Jungle Tales of Tarzan, clearly influenced by Native American traditional stories, and the novels Tarzan of the Apes (first in the series), The Mucker, and The Moon Maid, among others, as evidence that Burroughs could indeed compose works of considerable quality when he took the time to do so. And his courage to write in many genres - not only science fiction and fantasy, but Westerns (especially The War Chief and Apache Devil), then-modern gritty drama reminiscent of Frank Norris or even F. Scott Fitzgerald (such as The Efficiency Expert, The Girl from Farris's, and Marcia of the Doorstep), historical fiction (The Outlaw of Torn and I am a Barbarian), and even a stage play (You Lucky Girl!, which finally debuted to very positive reviews in 1997 ) - suggest his determination to be considered a serious author.
Criticism
Burroughs often displayed a sense of social consciousness that, if unremarkable today, was in his time (and especially among the authors and genres with which he is most associated, groups that were socially conservative because their goal was to provide escapist entertainment, not to challenge the status quo) quite unusual; in this wise Burroughs deserves comparison with how Harriet Beecher Stowe transformed the stereotypical "slave romance" for white audiences into a powerful polemic against slavery or how Charles Dickens magnified the popular periodical-serialized novel into an urgent call for class reform. While Jews, for instance, are unfortunately sometimes portrayed in negative stereotype in the Tarzan novels, The Red Hawk, the third section of The Moon Maid, includes an elderly Jewish character who is drawn sympathetically as evidencing considerable heroism. Likewise, Blacks (again, especially in the Tarzan novels, but also in the Mars series) and Asians (particularly in the three-part The Moon Maid) are depicted sometimes as stereotypes and just as frequently as wise or valorous. His Native American characters, from the early Westerns to The Red Hawk are more universally presented as honorable and courageous, in a time when the military subjugation of Native Americans was still vivid memory; based loosely on Native Americans, the green Martians (like the black, white, red, and yellow races) have their villains and heroes, including a woman named Sola and the magnificently fierce chief Tars Tarkas. Burroughs's female characters are frequently not simply there to scream and be rescued and later espoused by the heroes (as is the case in other genre fiction of his day, a time when women's suffrage was still a hot issue), but as equal counterparts: just as strong, intelligent, courageous, and resourceful as the males. To give but one example, Tavia in A Fighting Man of Mars fights side by side with Tan Hadron of Hastor, the protagonist, with equal effectiveness, setting up a deliberately sharp contrast (with which Burroughs concludes the story) to the beautiful but vain and vapid Sanoma Tora with whom Hadron had thought he was in love. It seems fair to say that Burroughs, who as noted was a moral absolutist, tended to portray individuals of every race and both genders as just that - as individuals, whose words and actions were what made them good or bad, and not their sex or heritage.
Themes
While Burroughs's antipathy for organized religion recurs as a frequent motif in his writings, his attitudes toward war appears to have changed during his career. Hollow idols and conniving clergy are deliciously skewered throughout the Mars series (especially among the Therns, but not to overlook the hilarious "Tur is Tur" scene in The Mastermind of Mars), but these are counterbalanced by refreshing references to the courageous soul seeking strength to go on by communing with a benign creator, references that have the feel of the spirituality of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, with whom Burroughs was surely acquainted. On the other hand, while war is painted as glorious and heroic in such earlier tomes as The Warlord of Mars, Beyond the Farthest Star suggests that in his last years, as this planet was tilting toward a second world war, Burroughs was ready to decry honestly the brutality of carnage that he himself witnessed as a war correspondent. It could even be postulated that Burroughs's most prescient vision of the future was in his implicit reevaluation of the then-axiomatic assumptions in dominant American society about religion and war, in his dramatization of the idea that social institutions serve humanity ill when they are misused to bolster the greed for vicious domination of the powerless, and his insistence that the individual who holds to the essential ethic of doing good to others is never entirely powerless against such institutions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, therefore, Burroughs would be unfairly dismissed as merely a hack writer; he seems not only to have striven to supersede his evident limitations as an author, but also to have striven against the prejudices and presumptions of his day. While the extent of his influence in this regard can of course not be measured, it must not be overlooked.
Selected bibliography
Barsoom series
Tarzan series
Pellucidar series
Venus series
Caspak series
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 serial, and others have the shorter version from the first book publication, which included all three parts under the title The Moon Maid.
Mucker series
Other science fiction
Jungle adventure novels
Western novels
Historical novels
Other works
Popular culture
- In chapter 16 of Stephen King's novel Desperation can be found the line "The Farting Buzzards of Desperation. Sounds like a... Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, doesn't it?" (Such adjective-noun-noun titles are actually a rarity among Burrough's novels; the closest analogue would be The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
Books on Edgar Rice Burroughs
See also
External links
- at
- on SciFan
- *Works by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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