Edgar Rice Burroughs

Titles in Fiction category:

• At the Earth's Core    

  You would surely have thought that I had been detected in no less a heinous crime than the purloining of the Crown Jewels from the Tower, or putting poison in the coffee of His Majesty the King.

• Beasts of Tarzan, The    

  "The entire affair is shrouded in mystery," said D'Arnot. "I have it on the best of authority that neither the police nor the special agents of the general staff have the faintest conception of how it was accomplished. All they know, all that anyone knows, is that Nikolas Rokoff has escaped." ...

• Carson of Venus

  India is a world unto itself, apart in manners, customs, occultism from the world and life with which we are familiar. Even upon far Barsoom or Amtor might be found no more baffling mysteries than those which lie hidden in the secret places of the brains and lives of her people. We sometim ...

• Chessmen of Mars, The

  Shea had just beaten me at chess, as usual, and, also as usual, I had gleaned what questionable satisfaction I might by twitting him with this indication of failing mentality by calling his attention to the nth time to that theory, propounded by certain scientists, which is based upon the asser ...

• Efficiency Expert, The    

  The gymnasium was packed as Jimmy Torrance stepped into the ring for the final event of the evening that was to decide the boxing championship of the university. Drawing to a close were the nearly four years of his college career--profitable years, Jimmy considered them, and certainly successfu ...

• Gods of Mars, The    

  As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in the early part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt again the strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars, which for ten long ...

• Jungle Tales of Tarzan, The    

  Teeka, stretched at luxurious ease in the shade of the tropical forest, presented, unquestionably, a most alluring picture of young, feminine loveliness. Or at least so thought Tarzan of the Apes, who squatted upon a low-swinging branch in a near-by tree and looked down upon her.

• Land That Time Forgot, The    

  It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened--the afternoon of June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through--all those weird and terrifying experiences--should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months. Ra ...

• Lost Continent, The

  Since earliest childhood I have been strangely fascinated by the mystery surrounding the history of the last days of twentieth century Europe. My interest is keenest, perhaps, not so much in relation to known facts as to speculation upon the unknowable of the two centuries that have rolled by ...

• Monster Men, The

  As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak de ...

• Mucker, The

  Billy Byrne was a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago's great West Side. From Halsted to Robey, and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name. And, in proportion to their number which was considerably less, he knew the patrolm ...

• Out of Time's Abyss

  This is the tale of Bradley after he left Fort Dinosaur upon the west coast of the great lake that is in the center of the island.

• Outlaw of Torn, The    

  Here is a story that has lain dormant for seven hundred years. At first it was suppressed by one of the Plantagenet kings of England. Later it was forgotten. I happened to dig it up by accident. The accident being the relationship of my wife's cousin to a certain Father Superior in a very a ...

• Pellucidar    

  Several years had elapsed since I had found the op- portunity to do any big-game hunting; for at last I had my plans almost perfected for a return to my old stamping-grounds in northern Africa, where in other days I had had excellent sport in pursuit of the king of beasts.

• People Out of Time    

  I am forced to admit that even though I had traveled a long distance to place Bowen Tyler's manuscript in the hands of his father, I was still a trifle skeptical as to its sincerity, since I could not but recall that it had not been many years since Bowen had been one of the most notorious prac ...

• Princess of Mars, A    

  I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and mor ...

• Return of Tarzan, The    

  "Magnifique!" ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath.

• Son of Tarzan, The    

  The long boat of the Marjorie W. was floating down the broad Ugambi with ebb tide and current. Her crew were lazily enjoying this respite from the arduous labor of rowing up stream. Three miles below them lay the Marjorie W. herself, quite ready to sail so soon as they should have clambered a ...

• Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar    

  Lieutenant Albert Werper had only the prestige of the name he had dishonored to thank for his narrow escape from being cashiered. At first he had been humbly thankful, too, that they had sent him to this Godforsaken Congo post instead of court-martialing him, as he had so justly deserved; but ...

• Tarzan of the Apes    

  I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

• Tarzan the Terrible    

  Silent as the shadows through which he moved, the great beast slunk through the midnight jungle, his yellow-green eyes round and staring, his sinewy tail undulating behind him, his head lowered and flattened, and every muscle vibrant to the thrill of the hunt. The jungle moon dappled an occasio ...

• Tarzan the Untamed    

  Hauptmann Fritz Schneider trudged wearily through the somber aisles of the dark forest. Sweat rolled down his bullet head and stood upon his heavy jowls and bull neck. His lieutenant marched beside him while Underlieutenant von Goss brought up the rear, following with a handful of askaris the t ...

• Thuvia

  Upon a massive bench of polished ersite beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant pimalia a woman sat. Her shapely, sandalled foot tapped impatiently upon the jewel-strewn walk that wound beneath the stately sorapus trees across the scarlet sward of the royal gardens of Thuvan Dihn, Jeddak of Ptar ...

• Warlord of Mars, The    

  In the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain by the side of the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, beneath the hurtling moons of Mars, speeding their meteoric way close above the bosom of the dying planet, I crept stealthily along the trail of a shadowy form that hugged the dark ...

About the Author

American novelist, creator of the world famous character of Tarzan, one of the indispensable icons of popular culture. Burroughs also published science fiction and crime novels. Critics have considered Burroughs's fiction often crudely written and chauvinist. His books, however, are still widely read and usually more interesting than the films. It is true that Burroughs often portrayed Africans, Arabs or Asians as evil or comic, but the stories also contain several elements that have kept them 'politically correct': Waziri warriors are brave, and his cave girl Nadara and Dejah Thoris, the princess of Mars, are courageous and resourceful characters.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago, Illinois, into a prosperous family. His father, George Tyler Burroughs, was a Civil War veteran. Burroughs attended several private schools, including the Michigan Military Academy, Orchar Lake (1892-95), where he was instructor and assistant commandant (1895-96). He served in the 7th Cavalry in the Arizona Territory (1896-97) and Illinois Reserve Militia (1918-19). After military career Burroughs was owner of a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho (1898), and associated with American Battery Company, Chicago (1899-03). In 1900 he married Emma Centennia Hulbert (divorced in 1934); they had two sons and one daughter).

The next ten years the family lived near poverty. Burroughs was associated with Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company in Idaho (1903-04), a railroad policeman in Salt Lake, Utah (1904), a manager of stenographic department at Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago (1906-08), a partner of an advertising agency (1908-09), an office manager (1909), a partner of a sales firm (1910-11). In 1910-11 Burroughs worked for Champlain Yardley Company, and from 1912 to 1913 he was manager of System Service Bureau.

Before Tarzan Burroughs led a life full of failures. The turning point came when he started to write for pulps at the age of 35 - firmly convinced that he could write as rotten stuff as published in pulp fiction magazines. His first professional sale was Under the Moons of Mars, serialized in 1912 and introducing the popular invincible hero John Carter, who is transported to Mars apparently by astral projection, following a battle with Apaches in Arizona. The 'Martian' series eventually reached eleven books. Other popular series from Burroughs's pen were The Carson of Venus books, blending romance and comedy, the Pellucidar tales, located inside the Earth, and The Land That Time Forgot trilogy - totally some 68 titles.

Burroughs's first succesfull story was Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars which appeared in 1912 in All-Story Magazine. A few months later in 1912 appeared his breakthrough novel Tarzan of the Apes, followed by 24 other Tarzan adventures. ''If I had striven for long years of privation and effort to fit myself to become a writer,'' Burroughs later told, ''I might be warranted in patting myself on the back, but God knows I did not work and still do not understand how I happened to succeed.'' In 1913 Burroughs founded his own publishing house Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises and Burroughs-Tarzan Pictures were founded in 1934.

The world famous protagonist in Tarzan books is John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, whose aristocratic parents are abandoned on the west coast of Africa. He is orphaned as a child and raised by an ape, but grows into a leader of the hairy tribe. In the jungle Tarzan learns to read when he finds a book from the remnants of his parents hut. During the tale, Tarzan finds love, becomes a hero, and finds his arictocratic roots. His wife is an American woman, Jane Porter, they also have a son. With the help of animals - mostly elephants and apes - Tarzan gains the unofficial status of the king of the jungle, and gains immortality through an African shaman's secret formula. In several Tarzan books the invincible hero is involved with lost races, hidden cultures, or even with an entire lost continent, but never shows any inclination of taking more than ones share of fortunes during his adventures.

In addition to his four major adventure series, Burroughs wrote between the years 1912 and 1933 several other adventure novels, among them The Cave Girl (1925), in which a weak aristocrat develops into a warrior, two Western novels about a white Apache, The War Chief (1927) and Apache Devil (1933), showing sympathy for Native Americans, and Beyond the Farthest Star (1964), in which science-fiction canon is used to depict the brutality of war.

In 1919 Burroughs purchased a large ranch in the San Fernando Valley, which he later developed into the suburb of Tarzana. To pay his expensive lifestyle and to cover his misadventures in financial investments he wrote an average of three novels a year. The first Tarzan film was produced in 1918, When the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller took the role in the 1930's, the films became really popular.

In 1933 Burroughs was elected mayor of California Beach. He married in 1935 Florence Dearholt (they divorced in 1942). During World War II Burroughs served at the age of 66 as a war correspondent in the South Pasific. He also wrote columns ('Laugh It Off) for Honolulu Advertiser (1941-42, 1945). Burroughs died of a heart ailment on March 19, in 1950.

After Burroughs's death, enthusiasm for his books gradually waned. He once admitted to an interviewer: "I don't think my work is 'literature', I'm not fooling myself about that." In 1960s Edgar Rice Burroughs Corporation managed to arise a new interest in the author's work and his books have been since profitably in print. While criticized as repetitious and clumsy, Burroughs's stories share the same colourful imagination familiar from the classic works of H.G. Wells and H. Rider Haggard. Burroughs's novels have also became target for academic research.

Author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar. Used with permission.