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 his military career Burroughs became the owner of a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho (1898), and had then dealings with the American Battery Company, Chicago (1899-03). In 1900 he married his childhood sweetheart Emma Centennia Hulbert (divorced in 1934); they had two sons and one daughter. Possibly in Idaho he became familiar with the work of H. Rider Haggard, Kipling, Swift, Verne, and Wells, all of whom may have influenced his own writing.
For the next ten years the family lived in near poverty. Burroughs was associated with Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company in Idaho (1903-04), he was a railroad policeman in Salt Lake, Utah (1904), a manager of a 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 at the age of 35 when he began to contribute to pulp magazines – firmly convinced that he could write as rotten stuff as was published in them. His first professional sale was 'Under the Moons of Mars', serialized in 1912. It introduced the popular invincible hero John Carter, who is transported to Mars apparently by astral projection, following a battle with Apaches in Arizona. Carter's adventures were compiled in book form under the title A Princess of Mars (1917). The 'Martian' series eventually reached eleven books. The Carson of Venus books blended romance and comedy, the Pellucidar tales were located inside the Earth.
Burroughs's first successful story was 'Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars' which appeared in 1912 in All-Story Magazine. Burroughs's breakthrough novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) was 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 said, ''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.
In addition to his four major adventure series, Burroughs wrote between the years 1912 and 1933 several other adventure novels, including 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), which showed sympathy for Native Americans, and Beyond the Farthest Star (1964), a science-fiction novel about the brutality of war.
In 1933 Burroughs was elected mayor of California Beach. He married in 1935 Florence Dearholt; they divorced in 1941 due to Burroughs's alcoholism. During World War II Burroughs served as a war correspondent in the South Pacific. He also wrote columns ('Laugh It Off) for Honolulu Advertiser (1941-42, 1945). Burroughs died of a heart ailment on March 19, in 1950, while reading a comic book in bed.
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