Tarzan Forever : The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan

When Tarzan of the Apes was published in The All-Story in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs was just another would-be writer struggling to support himself and his family by penning adventure stories for readers of "the pulps, " the cheap mass-market magazines popular at the time. When he died in 1950, he was the bestselling author of the twentieth century, overseeing interests that spanned publishing, movies, radio, newspaper syndication, toys, even real estate. He had millions of enthusiastic readers around the world and had earned the respect of magazines that never published his stories: The Saturday Evening Post admitted of Burroughs's writing, "There are pages of his books which have the authentic flash of storytelling genius." He was, in short, a publishing wonder who had unexpectedly created the century's first superhero, Tarzan -- a popculture icon that has known few rivals.

John Taliaferro has been a senior editor at Newsweek and Texas Monthly. He is the author of one other book, also a biography: Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist. He divides his time between Texas and Montana.

Chapter One

The Sum of the Parts

"If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor," Edgar Rice Burroughs lectured young authors. In his case, though, it took far fewer to hit the mark. Tarzan of the Apes , written when he was thirty-six years old, was only the third story Burroughs submitted for publication. It ran in full in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story , taking up virtually the entire magazine. The reception exceeded the wildest dreams of author and editors alike and triggered a phenomenon unprecedented in publishing history. Dazzled readers proclaimed Tarzan one of the best adventure tales ever and pleaded for more. And so Burroughs obliged: twenty-three more Tarzan novels over the next thirty years, plus another fifty non-Tarzans, including eleven set on Mars, six at the center of the Earth, and five on Venus. A formal accounting of Burroughs's total sales has never been made, but the most conservative estimate is thirty million books sold during his lifetime; a more generous tally is sixty million. Considering that Burroughs's titles have been published in more than thirty languages and given the broad circulation of his stories in magazines and comics, there can be little question that he was the most widely read American author of the first half of the twentieth century.

    "I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or any other," he begins his chronicle of an orphaned child raised by apes. More truthfully, his tale was guided by a number of distinguishable sources, including the legend of Romulus and Remus, wild children of early Rome; Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves in Kipling's The Jungle Book; and travelogues of colonial Africa from the end of the nineteenth century. Burroughs had never heard of Rousseau's noble savage or Nietzsche's Übermensch , and though he owned a copy of Darwin's The Descent of Man , he never got much beyond sketching a monkey on the title page. Nevertheless, he had acquired a layman's grasp of one of the burning issues of the post-Victorian era--and for that matter, every period since. "I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment," he wrote in Writer's Digest twenty years after the first publication of Tarzan of the Apes . "For this purpose I selected an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort, and at an age at which he could not have been influenced by association with creatures of his own kind I threw him into an environment as diametrically opposite that to which he had been born as I might well conceive."

    Baby Tarzan, as nearly everyone knows, grows up to become lord of the apes. He is a crafty woodsman and a silent stalker. His eyes, ears, and nose miss nothing. He "fills his belly by the chase" and prefers his meat raw. He backs down to neither man nor beast and does not recognize fear. "I know the word," he says in Tarzan and the Leopard Men, "but what has it to do with death?" Every Tarzan tale is full of stupendous action: mortal combat with apes and lions and breathtaking aerial traverses of the "middle terraces" of the African forest. In its sheer passion, Tarzan's yell, the victory bellow of the bull ape, is the supreme cri de coeur , and his romance with Jane is as primal and star-crossed as those of Romeo and Juliet or Beauty and the Beast.

    But what many people forget--particularly those more familiar with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's and Johnny Weissmuller's film version of the Tarzan story--is that Tarzan, besides being king of the jungle, is also the son and rightful heir of England's Lord and Lady Greystoke, and in the final pages of Tarzan of the Apes , he must come to terms with his gentility. Loincloth, knife, and bow remain his preferred wardrobe, but he adjusts to tailored suits and cafe society with remarkable ease. In later episodes, he flies a plane, quotes Latin, and oversees English and African estates. Blood--in his case, blue blood--always tells, an axiom that Burroughs stresses in nearly all of his stories.

    In his sublime synthesis of nature and nurture, Tarzan is as timely as he is timeless. By the turn of the nineteenth century, America's idol of earthy virtue, the frontiersman, had been crowded out by the decadent city slicker and by a new class of immigrants, mostly Mediterranean and Eastern European, who, in contrast to the fin de siècle bourgeoisie, were deemed too uncouth, too thick-wristed to enrich the American commonweal. Enter Tarzan, the embodiment of Teddy Roosevelt's "strenuous life," a latter-day Leatherstocking whose exuberant physicality and solid pedigree provided a welcome antidote to the mongrel modern age.

    And in short order, he became a super hero, the first pop icon to attain global saturation. As such, he was the forefather of Superman and more recent real-life marvels such as Michael Jordan. Before Tarzan, nobody understood just how big, how ubiquitous, how marketable a star could be.

    But while there can hardly be a person on the planet who has not heard of Tarzan, very few are familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most who recognize the stuffy triple name assume that, like Lord Greystoke, he must be British, when in fact he was a native of Chicago and the founder of--what else?--Tarzana, California. Despite his enormous appeal, his work is not taught in schools or welcomed in the American canon; as a result, only diehard Burroughs buffs--most of whom cherish their collections of Burroughs books and memorabilia like splinters from the true cross--have any feel for the clever and complex creator of the century's most popular hero.

    One reason for Burroughs's undeserved ostracism is the stigma attached to pulp fiction. According to the laws of the cultural jungle, writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald are literary lions; Burroughs and other paid-by-the-word authors of science fiction, westerns, whodunits, and romantic confessionals are monkeys with typewriters--hacks. Burroughs pretended not to mind his lowbrow status. "I don't think my work is `literature,' I'm not fooling myself about that," he told the Los Angeles Times. Writers of his ilk, he volunteered with a shrug, belong "in the same class with the aerial artist, the tap dancer, and the clown." Even so, he tried again and again to break out of the pulp ghetto and place his stories in "slicks"-- The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Collier's --where the money and prestige were better.

    Because of his low regard for his profession and because he had backed into it at such a late age, Burroughs was always uncomfortable with his accomplishments. "If I had striven for long years of privation and effort to fit myself to become a writer, I might be warranted in patting myself on the back," he confessed to his brother George in 1929, "but God knows I did not work and still do not understand how I happened to succeed." Nevertheless, his imagination was evident from the start. He drew delightful caricatures and wrote clever verse as a young boy, creativity that was curbed by his short attention span and his unshakeable sense that he did not meet the standards of his father, Maj. George Tyler Burroughs, a well-to-do Civil War veteran. His academic record was erratic, demotions and dismissals negating any bursts of achievement. He won an appointment to West Point only to fail the entrance exam, and he never lasted long at jobs, even the ones at which he did well, such as supervising the stenography department at Sears, Roebuck. By the time he started writing in earnest, he did so more out of resignation than avocation. "I was sort of ashamed of it as an occupation for a big, strong, healthy man," he confessed.

    To thrive in the pulp market, where a good rate was a penny a word, a natural flair for storytelling was essential. "Plots are in the air. All you have to do is reach out and take them," Burroughs said of his knack for spinning yarns with such apparent ease. But without his array of other talents, he might easily have failed. His energy was titanic, like that of his fictional heroes. In a morning, he could conjure and conquer entire worlds, pecking thousands of words or filling a half-dozen dictaphone cylinders, even with his children crawling at his feet and creditors buzzing around his ears. More remarkable still was his head for business. In 1923, he became one of the very first writers to incorporate, and over the years, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., grew into a complex organism. Most of his stories were first serialized in inexpensive magazines--known as pulps, for the low-grade paper on which they were printed. After that, they were published in book form. Then the "first edition" books became "popular" editions, or cheap hardcovers, the forerunners of paperbacks. This progression was not unusual: most of Jack London's yarns of the Far North, Zane Grey's westerns, and H. Rider Haggard's African adventures also appeared in magazines before they became best-selling books. But in one very important respect, Burroughs was in a league all his own. In 1931, he grew weary of having to share his income with middlemen--"parasites," he called them--and began publishing his own books under the ERB, Inc., imprint. Still not content with the return on his creative capital, he struck deals to turn Tarzan into a radio show, a daily newspaper strip, a Sunday comic page, and, most lucrative of all, motion pictures. Though marketing experts and syndication agents warned that Tarzan on the radio would compete with Tarzan in the comics or that serial motion pictures would steal audiences from feature motion pictures, Burroughs was convinced that the total would exceed the sum of the parts. As he saw it, there was no such thing as overkill, and well before Walt Disney ever hawked his first mouse ears or Ninja Turtle "action figures" became film stars, Burroughs was already a grand master of a concept that would one day be known as multimedia. He licensed Tarzan statuettes, Tarzan bread, Tarzan ice cream, bubble gum, bathing suits, and puzzles, and he founded a national network of Tarzan "clans" to convert American youth to the Tarzan way.

    Yet for all his ingenuity and diligence, too often his successes were offset by disappointment and liability. With only a couple of exceptions, he never did graduate from the pulps. He failed at two marriages and was obliged to subdivide his beloved Tarzana ranch, paving the way, literally and ironically, for a suburb of drive-ins, drive-throughs, and mini-malls. Despite his extraordinary popularity, he never made a killing on any one deal. Royalty checks came frequently, but they never amounted to more than a few thousand dollars. Even in years when his income exceeded one hundred thousand dollars--most years it was far less--his appetites and expenses always seemed to leave him cash poor. He had a weakness for Thoroughbreds and fast cars, and after he met his second wife, Florence, he made the mistake of trying to keep pace with the spendthrift elite of Hollywood and Palm Springs. Nor did it help his pocketbook and peace of mind to be perennially repelling lawsuits, mostly disagreements over permissions and royalties, or making legal thrusts of his own. And through it all, he had mouths to feed. Florence and her two children were but his latest dependents; his own children, Joan, Hully, and Jack, were on the ERB, Inc., payroll for much of their adult lives, as were his alcoholic first wife, Emma, his daughter's deadbeat husband, Jim Pierce, and his trusted man Friday, Ralph Rothmund.

    Because of this relentless overhead, he could never afford to stop writing. The beast had to be fed constantly. Some years he wrote three or four hundred thousand words, four or five books' worth. Tarzan, naturally, was his mainstay; he averaged one a year. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the other fifty titles as chaff. His painstakingly researched a pair of novels about the Apache warrior Shoz-Dijiji are noteworthy for their progressive characterization of Native Americans. The Girl from Hollywood , his autobiographical novel about a California ranch family ruined by booze, dope, and movieland promiscuity, is an equally fascinating cultural document. He may not have been the first writer to fantasize about Mars, but in light of recent astrophysical evidence suggesting that life might once have existed there, and NASA's pledge to one day land on its surface, Burroughs, who grew up in an era before airplanes or automobiles, deserves a salute for fanning the dream.

    It is true that some of his stories are duds. They suffer from continuity problems, and the gimmicks are threadbare. But considering how quickly he crafted his plots, most of them are amazingly tight and considered. He imbues each of his worlds, ape or alien, with what H. G. Wells called "practical incredibleness." Burroughs visualized them so completely, in fact, that he worked up maps of their kingdoms, sketches of their costumes, and alphabets and glossaries of their languages, including a comprehensive "Ape-English/English-Ape" dictionary. He took particular care in the taxonomy of monsters and beasts: for instance, the cyclopean Plant Men of Mars have hair follicles "the bigness of a large angle-worm" and the nose of "a fresh bullet hole that had not yet begun to bleed." ("Of the few stories that I have had rejected," he told a fan, "grewsomeness [ sic ] was the principal cause.")

    In a typical Burroughs tale, the hero is a stranger in a strangeland--Tarzan in the jungle, John Carter on Mars, David Innes in the Inner World, Carson Napier on Venus. He is a warrior by both breeding and training. Repeatedly he is chased, outnumbered by savage hordes, and thrown into a "Stygian" cell of "Cimmerian" darkness. "Where there is life there is hope," exclaims John Carter when the going gets roughest, an optimism shared by all Burroughs protagonists. By application of brawn, brains, and valor, he eventually prevails over his adversaries and either makes his way home or else finds a new and better home.

    Always, too, the leading man is called on to rescue a damsel in distress with whom he inevitably falls in love. Boy meets girl was hardly a new motif by the time Burroughs got around to employing it, though, remarkably, he was the first to introduce it to science fiction. (The subgenre would come to be labeled "scientific romance.") In most instances, the object of the hero's affections is well-born, beautiful, and though indubitably chaste, often provocatively clad--or in some instances, virtually unclad. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, parades through eleven novels seminude.

    "Entertainment is fiction's purpose," Burroughs insisted time and time again, and he pleaded innocent to "disseminating any great truths or spreading any sort of propaganda" in his stories. Glib demurrals aside, however, he frequently held forth, usually allegorically but sometimes quite overtly, on a wide range of political and social issues. His vicious attacks on Germany during World War I in Tarzan the Untamed and The Land That Time Forgot eventually cost him his lucrative German audience. Infected by the postwar Red Scare, he railed against socialism at home and abroad in The Moon Maid and a number of other stories.

    All of his plots, especially the Tarzans, boil down to survival of the fittest, a theme both romantic and political. Burroughs, like so many of his contemporaries, believed in a hierarchy of race and class. In the Tarzan stories, blacks are generally superstitious and Arabs rapacious. On Mars, the races descend from a Tree of Life and, like fruit, are color-coded red, green, yellow, and black. Burroughs was obsessed with his own genealogy and was extremely proud of his nearly pure Anglo-Saxon lineage. He came from "good" stock, a critical ingredient for good standing, he asserted. Over time, his fervid appreciation of genetic predetermination led him to the radical fringe of Darwinism: eugenics. At one point, he even wrote a column for the Los Angeles Examiner calling for the extermination of all "moral imbeciles" and their relatives, a doctrine that would soon be trumpeted by Adolf Hitler. In an unpublished essay, "I See a New Race," Burroughs offered his own Final Solution to the world's problems.

    But he was also canny enough to play both sides of the street. Even as he was stressing Tarzan's and John Carter's superior bloodlines, he honored the Algeresque notion of the common man pulling himself up by the bootstraps. In 1911, when he submitted his first story, A Princess of Mars , to the Munsey family of magazines, he chose the pen name Normal Bean to signify that he saw himself as just a regular fellow, a man of the people. On one hand, he assumed a certain aristocratic detachment from his work; on the other, he attributed his success to the fact that he shared "a common weakness with 120,000,000 other Americans." Not surprisingly, Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper was one of his favorite books, and he borrowed Twain's trick of role reversal in many of his own stories. Another mentor was Jack London, whose proletarian heroes survive more through grit than through grace. No matter how well-born (or low) one might be, Burroughs realized, no one was perfect, least of all himself. "Are the heart and soul of man any better because of civilization," he asked, "or is the apparent betterment [of civilization] merely ... veneer?"

    Indeed, there were periods when Burroughs's blithe hauteur failed him entirely, when self-effacement edged toward self-loathing. One of the worst occurred in 1940 and 1941, after he and Florence moved to Hawaii.

    He had first brought her to Oahu on their honeymoon in 1935, after a delicate divorce from his first wife and a bizarre courtship; Florence, a former silent-movie actress, had been married to one of his business partners and trusted friends. When they returned in April 1940, they were accompanied by Florence's two children, Caryl Lee and Lee. Burroughs was turning sixty-five; his wife was half his age. Back in Los Angeles, they had been living far beyond his means, and he had exhausted himself trying to keep up with her. Once in Hawaii, though, his strength returned and his spirits improved. As the celebrated master of Tarzan, he was welcomed by a loose fraternity of navy and army men with an unlimited quantity of booze on their hands. "All my plans for retiring into a hole and pulling the hole in after me have been shot to hell," he joked after one particularly enthusiastic run of revelry. "You just can't say no to the people over here." Florence, too, was a welcome addition to the mostly male gatherings, though to hear her tell it, her role soon devolved into chauffeuring her tipsy, sunburned husband home from luaus and wee-hour card games. If anything, she was having trouble keeping up with him .

    But while Hawaii provided a welcome change of scenery, it offered no escape. Between bridge, cocktails, and sunbathing, Burroughs still had to keep the pages coming. By the end of 1940, he had finished Mars, Inner World, and Tarzan manuscripts and was commencing a new Venus story. Over a period of ten days before Christmas, he wrote more than forty thousand words. That month, he, Florence, and the children had moved into the Niumalu Hotel in Honolulu, their third address since arriving in Hawaii. They had their own bungalow and most of their neighbors were long-term residents. Still, it was by no means a proper home. The rooms were cramped, buggy, and damp, and the family took their meals communally in the hotel's dining room. By mid-March, Florence had had enough. On the fourteenth, she and the children sailed for California. Four months later, she would sue for divorce, citing mental cruelty.

    Her chief complaint was that Burroughs had made her feel old, or, contrarily, that because she was thirty years younger, he had made a show of acting more youthful, but had succeeded only in behaving childishly. She, however, was not entirely exempt from blame herself. Money was always an issue with her: the Ed Burroughs she had first been attracted to was a natty, venerable, and, she assumed, prosperous gentleman. According to Burroughs's allies, she was crestfallen when he informed her that they had to hold their expenses, including rent, to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which was all the salary he was drawing from ERB, Inc., in 1941. With money, he was doubtless a father figure, potent and protective. On a budget, he was just another bald, slightly overweight old man.

    Alone for the first time in forty years, Burroughs became a virtual shut-in, hiding behind the drawn blackout curtains of his Niumalu bungalow and talking to no one for days. An old bladder problem flared up, and he was hospitalized. He suspected he was dying.

    Somehow he managed to keep plugging away at The Wizard of Venus , though his introductory paragraph reads like a note in a bottle. "I believe it was [explorer and natural historian] Roy Chapman Andrews who said that adventures were the result of incompetence and inefficiency," the story's hero, Carson Napier, declaims. "If that be so, I must be the prize incompetent of two worlds; for I am always encountering the most amazing adventures. It seems to me that I always plan intelligently, sometimes over meticulously; and then up jumps the Devil and everything goes haywire. However, in all fairness, I must admit that it is usually my fault.... I am rash. I take chances. I know that that is stupid. The thing that reflects most discredit upon my intelligence is the fact that oftentimes I know the thing I am about to do is stupid, and yet I go ahead and do it. I gamble with Death; my life is the stake." Burroughs was writing about the blunder that had first steered Carson Napier's spaceship in the direction of Venus, but he was also reflecting on his own decision to move to Hawaii, where his life was now very much in jeopardy.

    He might easily have perished in Honolulu if two events had not intervened. One was the arrival of his son Hully on an undisguised mission of mercy. The second was an event that changed millions of lives besides his own, though he was among the few who witnessed it firsthand.

    Unlike his fictional alter-egos, Burroughs had never been to war. He had been a cowboy and gold miner in Idaho and served in the United States Cavalry in Arizona. He had sailed through the Panama Canal, but never set foot in Africa, a continent he virtually owned in the popular imagination. He wrote about action, but his published words spoke louder than his own experience. "All the interesting things in my life never happened," he once confessed to an editor. "I am always late for the thrill. I always get to the fire after it is out."

    Until Sunday, December 7, 1941. That morning, Burroughs and Hully woke early to play tennis but were distracted by the sound of what they believed to be antiaircraft practice. They soon learned the truth: the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.

    That night, Burroughs and Hully patrolled the waterfront as volunteers in a civilian guard, and over the next four years, Burroughs made three trips to Pacific war zones and enjoyed the distinction of being the oldest American correspondent to cover World War II. His dispatches were not widely read, and he was far from a hero. Still, the tours of duty made up for a lot: his disillusionment as a cavalryman, his rejection by the Rough Riders in 1898, his relegation to the reserves during World War I, and the general sense of qualified achievement that had nagged him for most of his career.

    He had never explicitly yearned for his life to imitate his art; just the same, it finally did. If writing Tarzan of the Apes had been the first big turning point in his life, World War II was the second and, in a way, it was the climax, as well. After the war, Burroughs returned to California, where he was at long last reunited with his children and grandchildren. He died not far from Tarzana in 1950, a relatively contented man.

    Fifty years later, the time has come to reappreciate this imaginative, vigorous figure who played such a crucial role in shaping the century now so near its close. The life of Edgar Rice Burroughs is a chronicle of personal highs and lows, successes and insecurities that faithfully mirror the aspirations and tensions of the society around him. To be sure, pop culture--books, magazines, movies, radio, comics--would have burgeoned without Burroughs; but as one of its most innovative and prolific contributors, he truly had a Tarzan-size impact.

Copyright © 1999 John Taliaferro. All rights reserved.