Birthday: "She did not admire him any more than she had. It was merely that she considered him the Lesser of two evils."

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)

Author

Burroughs spent nearly half his life being a first-class screwup. He failed at military service; as a gold miner; as a cowboy; as a shopkeeper; as an “expert accountant.” In 1911 he was so hard up he applied for a post in the Chinese Army. The Chinese Army turned him down, too.

He was a sales rep for a pencil sharpener company- he hired others to go out and fail at selling pencil sharpeners for him- when he decided he could at least write as badly as the pulp magazine fiction writers he read while waiting for his reps to turn in their reports of no sales.

So he cranked out an installment of a story he titled Under the Moons of Mars, and sold the serial rights for the then princely sum of $400 (a Ford Model T, fully equipped, was $780 that year). In 1912 he got $700 for the pulp rights to a new creation, Tarzan of the Apes. After rejection by a number of publishers, he got the tale out in book form in 1914, and it sold like crazy.

His timing was perfect; Burroughs saw the potential of new technologies. The first of scores of Tarzan movies and TV shows came out in 1918 and was the first feature film to gross over $1 million. Later, he licensed comic strips, radio shows (his daughter, Joan, played Jane, opposed her Tarzan husband, James Pierce), and merchandise of all sorts. By 1919 he would afford a big spread outside Los Angeles; the fast-growing city soon surrounded him and in 1923 he sold it for development as the city of Tarzana.

Burroughs wrote westerns and historical fiction, and created another series, John Carter of Mars, that created generations of sci fi fans of the Burroughs output. In 1942, at 67, he became the oldest American war correspondent, filing stories for United Press in the Pacific.

Tarzan, as envisioned by Burroughs, was an Anglo-Saxon god who, when not living the African jungles where he was orphaned by his marooned parents, sat in the British House of Lords. He had superhuman skills, not least linguistic: the great apes, French, Finnish, English,Dutch, German, Swahili, many Bantu dialects, Arabic, ancient Greek, ancient Latin, Mayan, the languages of the Ant Men and of Pellucidar.He also communicated with many species of jungle animals, and could wrestle wild beasts of almost any size into submission. Though he loved the royalties- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. is still in business- he disliked the Hollywood recreation of his idol as a grunting hulk. After marrying Jane and living in England for a time, Tarzan- John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke- retired a vast African estate, not the jungle hut of Johnny Weissmuller.

Burrough’s admired Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, another jungle denizen, and modeled Tarzan after him; Kipling, for his part felt Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes to see how bad a book he could write and get away with. The anthropologist Jane Goodall, who grew up reading Tarzan stories, always thought she could make a much better wife to Tarzan than the rather priggish Jane. Her career in the jungle was, she maintained, to no small degree her enactment of the Tarzan story.

Burroughs himself died in 1950, utterly indifferent to the critical panning his works got over four decades. He laughed all the way to the bank.

Henry Bemis Books celebrates literary birthdays daily, at www.henrybemisbookseller.blogspot.com. Come read a few!