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Sunday 22 September 2013

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth son of businessman and Civil War veteran Major George Tyler Burroughs (1833–1913) and his wife Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs (1840–1920).

He attended the Brown School, then, due to a diphtheria epidemic, Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls, then the Harvard School, Phillips Andover and the Michigan Military Academy. Burroughs was a mediocre student and flunked his examination for West Point.

He ended up as an enlisted soldier with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory. After being diagnosed with a heart problem and thus ineligible to serve, Burroughs was discharged in 1897.

After his discharge, Burroughs worked a number of different jobs. He drifted and worked on a ranch in Idaho for time. By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as stationery salesman.

Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first magazine story in 1912 about an abandoned English boy raised by African apes. Tarzan, "King of the Jungle," became one of the 20th century's best-known fictional characters.

In 1916 Edgar Rice Burroughs was paid a record $5,000 cash advance on royalties for the film rights of the first Tarzan novel plus five per cent of the gross receipts. Tarzan of the Apes went on to take a million dollars at the box office.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 26 Tarzan books without ever visiting Africa.


Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California in 1919, which he named "Tarzana." The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their community, Tarzana, California was formed in 1927.

He also wrote a series of novels about life on Mars, including A Princess of Mars (1917) and Synthetic Men of Mars (1940).

Burroughs became a pilot in the 1920s, purchasing an Security Airster S-1, and encouraging his family to learn to fly.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Burroughs was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being in his late 60s, he applied for permission to become a war correspondent. This permission was granted, and so he became one of the oldest war correspondents for the U.S. during the Second World War.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Burroughs died alone in his Encino, California home of a heart attack after many health problems, on March 19, 1950, He had spent his last hour alive reading the Sunday comics in bed,

He wrote 91 novels in total selling hundreds of millions of copies in over thirty languages. He once said "I write to escape ... to escape poverty."

American film director Wes Anderson is Burroughs' great-grandson.

Source Wikipedia

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