Warlord of Mars

ANNOTATIONS

ANNOTATIONS

Born on the 1st of September 1875 in America, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a pulp fiction writer. He created the well-known character Tarzan, as well as John Carter, the adventurer of Mars. Burroughs is also the author of Pellucidar, a less known story about a fictional land situated into the hollow center of Earth.

Before becoming a writer, Burroughs occupied many jobs: soldier, cowboy, factory worker, manager of a mine owned by his brothers. After the failure of this mining company, Burroughs worked in railroad. He also worked as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, and began writing fiction in 1911. Burroughs was an avid reader of pulp fiction magazines at this time, and considered the stories it contained of being of poor quality. He famously said later that he thought: « ...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.

When the attack on Pearl Harbor occured, Burroughs, then in his late 60s, was in Honolulu. He applied to become a war correspondent, and became one of the oldest war correspondents during WWII. You can learn more about these events in the novel Don’t Go Near the Water, written by William Brinkley.

At the time of his death in 1950 (on March 19, 1950, from a heart attack), Edgar Rice Burroughs had written nearly 80 novels, and was the author who earned the most during his career from film adaptations of his stories. Indeed, the 27 Tarzan movies that were produced during his living were met with success at the box-office, and Burroughs was paid more than 2 million dollars in royalties.

His first story, Under the Moons of Mars, was published in serialized form in 1912, in the pulp magazine The All-Story. At this time, he used a pseudonym, Norman Bean. It launched the Barsoom series and was published in a book form in 1917, under the new title A Princess of Mars. At this time, the first three sequels of the Barsoom series were published as serials, and the first four Tarzan stories had been published as paperbacks.

Tarzan and the Barsoom series were met with success, and Burroughs notably started to exploit his Tarzan character in many media forms, such as a comic strip, merchandise, and movies. This was not frequent at the time, and many experts warned Burroughs of the risks of this practice, telling him that all of these media would just compete against each other and fail to generate money. The success of this endeavor proved the experts wrong, and Tarzan became a cultural icon.

Burroughs is considered to be an influential writer, and his Barsoom series influenced Scientifics and inspired them to explore Mars. An impact crater was then named in Burroughs honor after his death. Burroughs was inducted in 2003 into the Science-Fiction Hall of Fame.