On September 1, we celebrate the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the American novelist whose imagination carried generations of readers into jungles, beneath the surface of the Earth, across lost prehistoric worlds, and all the way to Mars.
Born in Chicago on September 1, 1875, Burroughs became one of the great architects of twentieth-century popular adventure fiction. His most famous creation, Tarzan, became far larger than the novels in which he first appeared. Tarzan moved into movies, radio programs, comic strips, television, animation, toys, and virtually every other form of popular entertainment.
Yet Edgar Rice Burroughs was far more than the creator of the Lord of the Jungle.
Long before science fiction routinely transported heroes between planets, Burroughs was sending John Carter across the mysterious landscapes of Barsoom—his imagined version of Mars. He dreamed up hidden civilizations inside the Earth, prehistoric islands where evolution seemed to have stopped, adventures on Venus, Western tales, and dozens of other stories.
Perhaps most remarkably, the literary career that produced all of this did not begin until Burroughs was in his mid-thirties.
His life is an extraordinary reminder that a creative career does not always begin on schedule.
🎂 Born in Chicago in 1875
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, into a prosperous family. His early life offered few obvious clues that he would eventually become one of the most successful creators of popular fiction of his era.
His education was somewhat unsettled. Burroughs attended several schools before graduating from the Michigan Military Academy in 1895. He hoped at one point to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point, but after failing the entrance examination, he enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry.
Military life did not become his career either.
Over the following years, Burroughs moved through a remarkable assortment of jobs and business ventures. He worked in different parts of the American West, became involved in various commercial enterprises, and repeatedly searched for the occupation that might finally provide him with a stable future.
By his mid-thirties, there was little to suggest that he was standing on the edge of an extraordinary literary career.
Then he began writing.
✍️ A Writer Who Started Later in Life
One of the most appealing parts of the Edgar Rice Burroughs story is how late his breakthrough arrived.
Burroughs was around 36 when he seriously turned toward fiction. Instead of emerging from literary circles or following a carefully planned career as a novelist, he entered storytelling after years of professional false starts.
He began looking at the inexpensive adventure magazines popular at the time and apparently concluded that if such stories could be published, he could probably write them too.
The result was anything but modest.
His first major success began as Under the Moons of Mars, serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912 under the name Norman Bean. The story would later be published in book form as A Princess of Mars.
With it, Burroughs introduced readers to one of his most important fictional worlds.
Mars became Barsoom.
And Barsoom was unlike almost anything readers had encountered before.
🔴 John Carter Goes to Mars
A Princess of Mars begins with John Carter, a mysterious former Confederate soldier who finds himself transported to Mars.
Burroughs’ Mars is not the scientifically realistic planet we understand today. It is an extravagant world of dying seas, ancient cities, enormous creatures, elaborate civilizations, aerial battles, sword fights, strange technologies, and larger-than-life heroes and villains.
John Carter soon encounters the formidable green Martians and meets Dejah Thoris, princess of the Martian city of Helium.
The resulting series became one of the foundational examples of what would later be called planetary romance—stories combining science fiction, fantasy, adventure, exploration, and romance in exotic extraterrestrial settings.
Burroughs ultimately wrote an entire sequence of Barsoom adventures.
Their influence spread far beyond their original magazine audiences. The idea of a hero traveling to another world and encountering elaborate alien civilizations would become one of the most familiar structures in science-fiction storytelling.
But astonishingly, Burroughs had another enormously successful character waiting in the wings.
🌿 The Arrival of Tarzan
In 1912, readers of The All-Story encountered Tarzan of the Apes.
The premise has since become so embedded in popular culture that it is easy to forget how extraordinary the story once seemed.
An English child, John Clayton, is orphaned in Africa and raised among a fictional species of great apes. Growing up outside human civilization, he becomes extraordinarily strong, agile, intelligent, and self-reliant.
He becomes Tarzan.
When outsiders eventually enter his world—including Jane Porter—Tarzan begins moving between two identities: the supposedly wild world in which he was raised and the human society to which he was born.
The story became an enormous success.
After appearing in magazine form, Tarzan of the Apes was published as a book in 1914. Burroughs continued writing Tarzan adventures for decades, transforming one successful novel into an enormous fictional universe.
Tarzan became something even bigger.
He became a cultural icon.
🎬 From Books to Movies, Comics & Radio
Few fictional characters have traveled through popular culture as successfully as Tarzan.
The character appeared in motion pictures remarkably early, beginning his screen career before becoming a newspaper comic-strip hero. Over the decades, numerous actors would portray Tarzan, with Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller becoming perhaps the most famous screen incarnation.
Tarzan also entered newspaper comic strips, radio dramas, comic books, television shows, animation, merchandise, and countless adaptations.
By the 1930s, Burroughs was not merely a novelist whose stories occasionally reached other media. He had become an early example of an author managing a sprawling entertainment property.
In 1923, he incorporated Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., helping him retain greater control over his creations and their licensing.
That combination of storytelling and business savvy was unusually forward-looking.
Today, the idea of building an entire entertainment franchise around fictional worlds is commonplace.
Burroughs was doing something remarkably similar more than a century ago.
🦖 Beyond Tarzan and Mars
Tarzan and John Carter would have been enough to establish Burroughs’ place in popular fiction, but his imagination ranged far beyond either series.
His Pellucidar novels imagined a mysterious world hidden inside the Earth. There, prehistoric creatures and strange civilizations survived beneath the planet’s surface.
In The Land That Time Forgot, Burroughs created the lost land of Caspak, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures remained alive.
The Carson of Venus novels sent readers to another planet.
He also wrote Westerns, historical adventures, futuristic stories, and novels involving lost civilizations and unexplored worlds.
Across these stories, certain Burroughs themes return again and again: unexplored frontiers, hidden societies, physical courage, strange landscapes, adventure, survival, romance, and the possibility that something astonishing might exist just beyond the boundaries of the known world.
Scientific realism was rarely the primary goal.
Wonder was.
🌎 The Ranch That Became Tarzana
Burroughs’ success eventually brought him to California.
In 1919, he purchased a large ranch in the San Fernando Valley formerly owned by newspaper publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Burroughs renamed the property Tarzana Ranch, borrowing the name from his most famous character.
As Los Angeles expanded, portions of the ranch were eventually sold for development.
The surrounding community ultimately adopted the name Tarzana.
It remains one of the more unusual examples of a fictional character leaving a permanent mark on an actual map.
More than a century after Tarzan first swung into popular culture, his name is literally part of Los Angeles.
📰 An Unexpected Final Adventure
Burroughs’ adventurous life had another remarkable chapter during World War II.
He was living in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Though already in his sixties, Burroughs subsequently worked as a war correspondent and covered military activity in the Pacific.
It seems strangely appropriate.
The man who had spent decades imagining daring journeys into dangerous unknown worlds found himself, late in life, reporting from one of the most consequential conflicts in history.
His health eventually declined, and he returned to California.
Edgar Rice Burroughs died in Encino on March 19, 1950, at the age of 74.
The worlds he created, however, were nowhere near finished with us.
📚 A Complicated but Enormous Literary Legacy
Reading Edgar Rice Burroughs today can be a different experience from reading him a century ago.
His novels emerged from the attitudes and assumptions of the early twentieth century, and modern readers will encounter racial stereotypes, colonial ideas, portrayals of Indigenous peoples, and attitudes toward gender and civilization that can feel deeply dated or troubling.
Recognizing those elements is part of reading older literature thoughtfully.
At the same time, acknowledging the limitations of Burroughs’ work does not require ignoring its remarkable influence.
He helped establish storytelling patterns that became fundamental to adventure, fantasy, science fiction, comics, movies, and other forms of popular entertainment.
Lost worlds.
Alien princesses.
Ancient civilizations.
Heroes transported to other planets.
Dinosaurs surviving in forgotten places.
Sword fights conducted against futuristic backgrounds.
Ordinary humans stepping across an invisible boundary into extraordinary worlds.
These concepts existed before Burroughs, but he combined and popularized them with extraordinary energy.
Generations of writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers followed those imaginative trails.
🚀 Helping Shape Modern Science Fiction
Burroughs did not write the sort of science fiction primarily concerned with technological accuracy or scientific prediction.
His gift was different.
He made other worlds feel irresistible.
Barsoom offered readers the pleasure of stepping onto another planet and discovering that it contained not emptiness but an entire civilization waiting beyond the horizon.
That approach became immensely influential in the development of science fantasy and planetary adventure.
Modern audiences accustomed to enormous fictional universes may find Burroughs surprisingly familiar. His stories jump between characters, civilizations, creatures, locations, technologies, and interconnected adventures in ways that anticipate the expansive franchises of contemporary entertainment.
Readers were not simply following John Carter.
They were returning to Barsoom.
They were not merely reading another Tarzan story.
They were entering Tarzan’s world.
That distinction matters.
Burroughs understood how powerful a fictional universe could become when audiences wanted to visit it repeatedly.
🌟 An Imagination That Refused to Stay on Earth
Perhaps that is the most enjoyable way to remember Edgar Rice Burroughs on his birthday.
His career began when many people might have assumed it was already too late to begin one.
Years of unsuccessful jobs and business ventures could easily have become the entire story of his professional life.
Instead, in his mid-thirties, he started inventing worlds.
Within only a few years, he had created both John Carter of Mars and Tarzan.
One hero traveled beneath alien moons.
Another moved through an imagined African wilderness.
Others would descend into the Earth’s interior, encounter prehistoric creatures, explore Venus, discover forgotten civilizations, and travel through landscapes governed primarily by the possibilities of Burroughs’ imagination.
He turned the blank page into unexplored territory.
And millions of readers followed him there.
🎂 Remembering Edgar Rice Burroughs on His Birthday
On September 1, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ birthday gives us an opportunity to remember one of the great popular storytellers of the early twentieth century.
He was not primarily interested in quiet realism.
He wanted adventure.
He wanted lost cities, enormous creatures, beautiful princesses, impossible landscapes, heroic battles, hidden worlds, and journeys to planets no human being had ever visited.
Literary fashions have changed enormously since his first stories appeared in 1912. Some aspects of his work have aged considerably better than others.
Yet the basic invitation behind his stories remains familiar.
What if there is another world waiting just beyond the one we know?
For Edgar Rice Burroughs, there almost always was.
Sometimes it was hidden in a jungle.
Sometimes it was beneath our feet.
And sometimes it was waiting beneath the moons of Mars.
Happy birthday, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
“And so, in silence, we walked the surface of a dying world, but in the breast of one of us at least had been born that which is ever oldest, yet ever new.
I loved Dejah Thoris. The touch of my arm upon her naked shoulder had spoken to me in words I would not mistake, and I knew that I had loved her since the first moment my eyes had met hers that first time in the plaza of the dead city of Korad.”
-Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
🔗 Related Articles
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Celebrating the Author of Frankenstein on Her Birthday
- A. S. Byatt: Remembering the Brilliant Author of Possession on Her 90th Birthday
- Dorothy Parker: Celebrating the Wit, Poetry, and Remarkable Legacy of a Literary Original
- The Life and Works of John Cheever: A Storyteller Ahead of His Time
📚 Sources
- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. — Edgar Rice Burroughs Biography
- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. — Biography, Part Two
- Library of Congress — Tarzan: From Big Screen to Comic Strip
- Library of Congress — Books That Shaped America: Tarzan of the Apes
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction — Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. — Corporate History
