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Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is a celebrated American novelist best known for the creation of the fictional character and immortal icon Tarzan as well as for the creation of the now famous hero John Carter. By and large, although Burroughs’s fictional production is often classified among ‘pulp literature’ by many a canonical critic, his numerous novels revolutionized the science-fiction novel and the adventure novel. Burroughs’s extraordinary characters rapidly found their way to other media than literature including cartoons, radio and cinema and thus made his fortune and fame. Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875 and educated in a number of different schools. It is said has it that as a teenager he had to move from one school to another because of the influenza epidemic of 1891. At a certain point of his early life, his father who was himself a civil war veteran, decided to give his son a military education and sent him to the Michigan Military Academy.
Burroughs almost had a life-time career in the army was it not for his health problems that disqualified him from the service. He then engaged in different jobs in which he was not very successful. These included running a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho, as well as working in his father’s firm. He later worked in his father’s American Battery Company before he got married to his childhood’s love Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900.
Burroughs was almost obsessed with running his own business. This made him feel uneasy with the many positions that he fulfilled in private companies. After moments of financial crises, he eventually established a private business selling pencil sharpeners to retailers. The tradition goes that when Burroughs was waiting for his salesmen he used to browse through magazines to check the placement of the advertisements of his own business. Many of such magazines were pulp fiction magazines that published serialized stories belonging to the romance, crime and science-fiction genres. It was thus that the idea came to him to start writing similar stories and sell them to such magazines. Once famous, Burroughs never stopped evoking this story, relating that he believed himself able to write much better stories than the ones he chanced to read. By 1911, he started writing stories to be serialized in magazines with the aim of just making money. However, his stories happened to please the famous magazine publisher Frank Munsey and the editor Thomas Metcalf who paid him generously.
Under the pseudonym Norman Bean, Burroughs published his first story Under the Moons of Mars whose title was chosen by the editor. The story became popular and encouraged the author to follow it up with sequels to be later referred to as the ‘Barsoom’ series. Before the publication of the last installment of Under the Moons of Mars, Burroughs’s second novel was completed and entitled The Outlaw of Torn. Though the latter was to be posthumously hailed as one of his finest achievements, Burroughs’s editor refused to serialize it. The novel was then sent to be published in five installments in the New Story Magazine in 1914. It was, however, Burroughs’s third work that brought him to immediate and unprecedented success with the creation of the immortal character of Tarzan, a good-natured savage born in the African jungle to dead English parents. He is brought up by a monkey tribe to become a man of great physical and intellectual abilities. Tarzan’s perfection was often a subject of disagreement between his creator and cinema directors who rather tend to highlight the animalistic side of the character. Burroughs often explained that Tarzan should not be portrayed as the savage from a colonialist perspective. For him, Tarzan should rather stand for all the qualities and the goodness of natural life. Indeed, after a journey into the ‘civilized’ world, Tarzan eventually decides to regain to the jungle, realizing that the latter is actually more natural, more true
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