This was not Mr. Burroughs’ only experience with cattle. He rode for the late senator “Jim” Pierce upon that cattle king’s extensive ranges in southeast Idaho in the days of horse thieves, cattle rustlers and pitched battles between sheep and cattle men, where even among men born to the leather he won a name for his mastery of bad horses, among them the locally notorious man killer, Black Pacer.
Since those days the writer has worked in placer mines in the mountains of Idaho and the valley of the Snake in Oregon; he has been a book agent in Chicago, a storekeeper in Pocatello; managed a mail order business in the East, and been a policeman in Salt Lake City. For two years he was department manager for the largest mail order house in the world, and later a high salaried business expert on the staff of System, the magazine of business.
In fact, up to a couple of years ago Edgar Rice Burroughs had done a great variety of things which did not include story writing, nor had he ever given the slightest promise of the latent talent within him. He says that he has always known that he could write, yet so jealously did he guard this belief that not even his wife guessed it until after his first story was half completed.
The mention of Mrs. Burroughs suggests naturally the home life of the author which is always pregnant with interest for those of us who come to love the writer through our love for Tarzan of the Apes, and D’Arnot, and Jane Clayton, and Captain John Carter, and Tars Tarkas, and the fierce and faithful Woola.
When Ed Burroughs was fourteen — he is “Ed” to men, women and children on his “block” — he began proposing to a little girl named Emma Hulbert. She is the daughter of one of the best known and most successful old-time hotel men of Chicago and St. Louis. For ten years “Ed” Burroughs haunted her, when he wasn’t out West, or in the army, or at school, and for ten years he kept on proposing and she continued to say “no.”
“She got so tired of being proposed to,” says Mr. Burroughs, “that she just had to marry me to get a little rest.”
Three beautiful children, Joan, Hulbert and Jack, the oldest six, clamber over Mr. Burroughs’ anatomy and desk and typewriter while he is turning out the tales you all clamor for.
“Were I literary, he says, “and afflicted with temperament I should have a devil of a time writing stories, for now comes Joan with Helen in one hand and Helen’s severed arm in the other, strewing a thin line of sawdust across my study floor. I may be in the midst of a thrilling passage-Tarzan may be pulling a tiger out of Africa by the tail — but when Joan comes even Tarzan pauses, and he stays paused until I have tied Helen’s arm to her torso once again for the hundredth time.
“Then may come Hulbert with an orange to be ‘turned insideout,’ or with a steam calliope announcement that he has discovered a ‘father long legs,’ and about the time he has been shunted outdoors with his velocipede Jack tumbles out of his go-cart with a vocal accompaniment that would drive the possessor of a temperament to the mad house.”
Next to Mr. Burroughs’ devotion to his family comes his love of motoring. Rain or shine, summer or winter, you may see him every afternoon with his family upon the Chicago boulevards or far out on some delightful country road beyond the city’s limits. He loves the country, too, and the great outdoors, and every sport and game that needs the open for its playing. Yet in few such sports does he excel. In football and horsemanship he climbed close to the top, and if he should confide in you I think that you would soon discover that his greatest pride lies in his ability to ride anything that wears hair.
His tennis is about the funniest thing I ever saw, and his golf is absolutely pathetic, yet he loves them both, and baseball, too, though he couldn’t hit a flock of balloons with the side of a barn door, and if he did probably he would be as likely to run for third base as first.
All in all there is nothing very remarkable about Edgar Rice Burroughs except his imagination. He is a sane, healthy American gentleman, very much in love with his wife and children and inordinately proud of them. Of himself or his work he is never very serious. I rather think that he looks upon it all as a huge joke that he and the public are playing on the publishers, for Mr. Burroughs’ rates are going up by leaps and bounds-and why not, when every publication that prints his stories is deluged with requests for more?
I said that next to his family came motoring in the affections of the author, but that is not quite true. I think his readers hold second place there. He is very fond of them, and while he likes to tantalize them a bit with an unsatisfactory ending now and then, his one thought is to write for them what they want. Many of them write to him from all parts of the world, and no matter how busy he may be it is always his first pleasure to answer these letters before any others, and the big loose leaf file in which he keeps these letters is his most cherished possession.
If you have read several of his stories I think that doubtless yon must have been impressed with the same fact that impressed me — that his stories are written solely to entertain. To every man his calling. There are those to whom God has given the power to instruct and lead their fellow men, and there are others endowed with a no less important ability — the ability to entertain —— and to give to the world clean, strong, virile stories —— stories that grip the boy and the boy’s father, and his mother and his sisters and his aunts, and such is the ability that God has given so bounteously to Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Practically, the story of Tarzan is the Robinson Crusoe idea over again. The lone man or boy fighting for his existence single-handed against nature always attracts readers when it is well done. This interest comes doubtless from something within us which goes back to the time when our ancestors were doing this kind of thing themselves. Tarzan always represents individual freedom, which, no matter how ready we may be to subscribe to social laws and restrictions, is always present with us. There is not a man or woman who occasionally does not like to get away into a more or less primitive wilderness where he is “monarch of all he surveys.”
Incidentally, Mr. Burroughs has a marvelous novelist’s imagination, and although his stories are impossible, yet it seems, when one is reading them, that they might have happened. Needless to say the producing of this illusion marks the finished story-teller. It makes little difference whether the story could happen. The point is whether the author tells it in such a manner that it impresses the reader so much he feels that it might happen.
The Tarzan books do not seem to follow ordinary laws. For instance, sequels as a rule are rarely as successful as the original story. Every Tarzan book, however, has sold far better than its predecessor in the same length of time, and so far there has not been the slightest let-up in the demand. The latest book, “Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar,” has been on the market about six weeks, and many thousands have been sold. It is one of the best selling books today in fiction, although you will not probably find it mentioned very prominently among the list of the best sellers.
Mr. Burroughs has six Tarzan stories now to his credit. It would seem as though this should be enough. He is not forcing the market at all, but magazine fiction readers are all the time crying for more Tarzan. Every Tarzan book since the first has been written in obedience to its demand. When the public gets tired of Tarzan then there will be an end of them, so far as Mr. Burroughs is concerned.
The moving picture of “Tarzan of the Apes” has been very successful. Wherever it has been shown it has attracted big audiences, and a marked increase in the sale of the Tarzan books has always followed immediately. We believe it is the intention of the management to follow this with other Tarzan films, if circumstances seem to warrant it, but we have no assurance of this. Possibly it will depend upon the continued success of the present film.
“A Princess of Mars” — The Book News Monthly, V. 36, No. 4, December 1917, p.132
No one but Mr. Burroughs would conceive so highly an imaginative piece of fiction as this. It is sensational, lurid. We follow a man to Mars, where he encounters wonderful adventures among a wonderful people
, and we drink it all in because the author makes it so real.
This is not as thrillingly delightful as the Tarzan stories, but it will certainly keep one wide awake and thinking.
“Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. — The Nation, V. 99, No. 2570, October 1, 1914, p.409
It is hard to imagine how more elements of mystery and thrill could be assembled between a pair of book-covers. We have heard of human children reared by beasts, but Mowgli is a feeble fancy compared with this hero. Tarzan is not only adopted by a she-ape, he is heir to an English title. He not only travels by preference through the treetops, with or without passengers, but he kills lions by jumping on their backs and carrying the double Nelson to its spine-breaking finish. He teaches himself to read and write English without ever having heard a word spoken, and learns to speak it clubmanly in the course of a week or two. In his character of naked savage he wins the love of the American maiden, and shows the result of Norman blood by his chivalrous treatment of her. He also finds a treasure chest for her indigent popper, rescues her from a. forest fire, and performs other feats too numerous to mention in this place. The crowning bit of ingenuity with which the author is to be credited is the means of his identification as the true Lord Graystoke. At six weeks of age he has left infant finger-prints upon a page of his father’s diary, and the diary has survived! Only persons who like a story in which a maximum of preposterous incident is served up with a minimum of compunction can enjoy these casual pages.
Popular Author Lives Here — Holly Leaves, V. VII, No. 33, February 22, 1919, p.3
Notable additions to the population of Hollywood are Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Rice Burroughs and children, who have taken the house at 1729 N. Wilton Place and intend to make their permanent home here, or in this vicinity. Mr. Burroughs is author of “Tarzan of the Apes” and other stories and is reputed to have made a fortune by his writings. His former home was in Oak Park, 111., where he was a major in the local battalion of the state troops that were kept in training for emergency duty in case of pro-German troubles in the adjacent city of Chicago.
Excerpted from “The Best-Seller Problem,” by A. Wyatt Tilby — The Edinburgh Review, V. 236, No. 481, July 1922, p.93-94
We turn to a very different author, who is read, one imagines, almost exclusively by men. The story of adventure still appeals; it and its cousin-german the tale of terror, with the ‘blood’ and the shocker, pirates and head-hunters, cannibals and treasure-trove, friends of our youth — these are the pabulum of the grown-up schoolboy. And in this vein Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs has carried everything before him with his ‘ Tarzan ‘ series and ‘ The ‘Gods of Mars.’
Mr. Burroughs dispenses with style and probability, but he gives us plenty of other things — one-eyed men, warriors with arms like trees, heroes who love heroines in another planet, and Martians who are sufficiently civilised to talk American-English.
Great artists from Homer to Swift and Coleridge have not disdained the grotesque and horrible, but it is the misfortune of Mr. Burroughs that in his hands these qualities become merely ridiculous. His books are a kind of addled H. G. Wells: that is to say, he gets an idea which Mr. Wells would have made into a brilliant fantasy like ‘The First Men in the Moon,’ or a piece of stark realism like the terrible ‘ Island of Dr. Moreau,’ and he treats the idea as Miss Dell’s heroes treat her heroines — he crushes it, he bruises it, he mangles it in page after page of turgid and slipshod English until the performance merely disgusts.
These deplorable novels are badly constructed and badly expressed; they are full of bad grammar, impossible situations, and absurd sequences. We do not say that they are the worst books ever written, but assuredly they are the worst books ever published. A primitive taste can enjoy Miss Dell, a sentimental taste can revel in Miss Stratton-Porter, but only a half-educated person could find anything to admire in ‘ The Gods of Mars.’ Unluckily there are enough half-educated persons to make a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr. Burroughs. Edition after edition of this hopeless nonsense and still more hopeless sequels has been called for. Anybody who wants to discover to what depths of folly the human mind can sink will be well advised to spend a few shillings on the author of’ Tarzan.’ The spiritualists and occultists, whom we had hitherto considered as the very dregs of the literary intellect, are almost brilliant by comparison with this nauseating stuff.
There are hundreds more authors on the booksellers’ counters — Rafael Sabatini, Sax Rohmer, Rex Beach, Phillips Oppenheim, Olive Wadsley, and others as well or better known — and most of them turn out the regular novel of commerce, some rather better, some a great deal worse. Two or three books a year, to say nothing of several short stories, is the average output of the popular writer. Most of this work is scamped or hasty: hardly any of it lives. But it is read, as the film is watched, by a vast indiscriminating public which knows its favourites, recognises their particular touch, and applauds their constant and calculated repetitions.
Excerpt from play review section by O.W. Firkins — The Weekly Review, V. 5, No. 123, September 17, 1921, p.256
“Tarzan of the Apes,” the straggling dramatization of a popular novel which resists dramatization with all its might, is a shapeless play with pleasant episodes. It may content the simple-minded, and I venture to think it might interest philosophers. Tarzan, a human infant, found and reared by apes, is restored at the age of twenty-two to civilization and an English peerage. I am sure that Swift, or Voltaire, or Anatole France would have found the mere idea provocative. How neat is the instant transition to a peerage — as if a lord were a middle term between ape and man! Then again, here is the boasted specific, civilization, and here is the patient before and after taking. Has he profited?
When he passed from tree to ground, did he ascend? Which of the Tarzans was the ape and which the man? In forty theatres or more in New York, six nights in the week, men ape each other; in the Broadhurst Theatre men are aping apes; on the stairs after the performance they ape the apery of apes. The fine thing about apehood is the glory of waking some day to find yourself a man, and the sad thing about manhood is the ignominy of waking to find yourself an ape. Yes, if you can not think at all, or if you can think originally, go to Tarzan; Tarzan, for the half-wise, is water-gruel; but it is meat for babes and for philosophers.
“The Beasts of Tarzan” by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. — The Nation, V. 102, No. 2649, April 6, 1916, p.386
This is the third number of a series of yarns about an ape-man which the publishers say has been a greater commercial success than any fiction they have issued for some time. From the literary point of view they are perfectly negligible. The style is absurd, the action is mechanical, the characterization is nil. Why, then, do they succeed? It is a question worth asking, now and again, in the face of such indications of popular taste. One way of answering it is to say that such books sell because they are so bad, because they are not books at all. The present commentator prefers to believe, and is able to believe, that they sell because they present in the crude forms assimilable by the crude tastes and intelligences of their special public certain commodities which are in themselves by no means contemptible. The style of these Tarzan tales is as good as it need be, if not as good as it can afford to be — that loose fustian of the cheap newspapers which is a literary standard for millions. As for true action and characterization, they are a pretence or an impertinence in literature of this type — a literature for children of all growths. The utmost one can ask for in a fairy-tale is a beautiful handling of impossible conventions. Here is an ugly handling — but the conventions are the same. The inventor of Tarzan has combined a number of them which never fall of their appeal. Mowgli, John Ridd, Fauntleroy — such are his literary prototypes. Tarzan was reared by apes, and has superhuman strength, and is an English lord to boot. He has also certain deadly human enemies of suitably foreign extraction, Russians with beards and with villanous intention
s which Tarzan foils and foils again. In this book they abduct him and carry him off to a desert island, where he promptly makes himself master of the jungle, and in due season, after a sufliciency of harmlessly horri — ble adventures, fetches back to civilization in triumph. We note that their contriver is careful not to kill off his villains, and we suspect that they will be bobbing up again presently, with more devilish schemes for Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, to upset at his leisure.
Mirilo Goes to the Movies — Theatre Magazine, V. XXVII, No. 205, March 1918, p.194
BROADWAY. “Tarzan of The Apes,” with Enid Markey. “Tarzan of the Apes,” produced by the National Film Corp. of America, from the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is above all else different, wherein its success should lie. We are, all of us, tired of looking at society, sex, allegorical and historical pictures, and it is a decided relief to view a picture with a unique jungle story, in which the hero is kidnapped as a child by apes and brought up by them. For “Tarzan of the Apes,” as he is called, lives through this thrilling experience after his mother and father, who have been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, and who, by the way, in England, are Lord and Lady Greystoke — have died. The throne, such as it is, having been purloined by Lord Greystoke’s brother, who marries a barmaid who in turn bears a son and expects said son to be the future Lord Greystoke, not knowing of Tarzan’s existence. Now that you have the plot, add some exciting jungle scenes, apes in great quantity, the appearance in jungle-land of Jane Porter in the person of Enid Markey, the subsequent falling in love of said young lady with Tarzan, the sudden and abrupt finish of the picture, and you have a close-up of “Tarzan of the Apes.” The abrupt ending of the picture was probably intentional, for, perhaps, the National Film Corporation have decided a sequel to “Tarzan of the Apes,” entitled “The Return of Tarzan.” As I said at the beginning, this picture’s fascination lies in its uniqueness.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 769
