If you live in California, or visit, you might at some point find yourself in Tarzana. It’s part of Los Angeles, and it’s named after a fictional character: Tarzan of the Apes. In the early 20th century, Tarzan was incredibly popular, and the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created the character, lived in that part of the city.
Burroughs was born September 1,1875, and didn’t at first set out to be a writer. He tried ranching, mining, prospecting, railroading, joined the army but was discharged due to a medical problem, and by 1911 was selling pencil sharpeners. Evidently it doesn’t take much effort to sell pencil sharpeners, because he had a lot of time on his hands and started reading the inexpensive pulp-fiction magazines that were popular at the time. As he said later, that gave him an idea: “… 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.”
He quickly discovered that he could, indeed, “write stories just as rotten,” and came up with Tarzan. The character was an immediate hit, and by 1920 Burroughs had become quite successful and began merchandizing Tarzan in every way he could think of: comic strips, movies, and products. Even today Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters ever — I mean, practically everybody has heard of him!
Once Burroughs started writing “rotten stories” (and trust me, his writing really is pretty rotten), he came up with some more characters and series, although none were quite as successful. John Carter, a character in the American west who one day wakes up and has been transported to Mars (where by coincidence there are plenty of beautiful, scantily-clad women and scary-but-vulnerable monsters) was the subject of quite a few books and even a couple movies. Burroughs’ other series include Pellucidar (set inside Earth, which turns out to be hollow), Amtor (very much like his Mars stories, but on Venus), and Caspak (which nowadays is better known as “The Land that Time Forgot.”
By chance, Burroughs was in Honolulu in December, 1941 when the attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the US into World War II. He was in his late 60s at the time, and quite wealthy, but became a journalist — a licensed war correspondent (“licensed” because you needed permission to accompany military units. He was probably the oldest correspondent during the war — you can read about his experiences in Don’t Go Near the Water, written by William Brinkley.
By the time he died of a heart attack in 1950 (at 74), Burroughs had published more than 80 books, and had licensed Tarzan to…wait for it…27 movies. In real life, there’s a crater on Mars named after him. And despite his “rotten stories,” writer Ray Bradbury called him “probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.” Not to mention Mars and Venus.
