This greeting was posted on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.” My older son fell in love with the Burroughs’ books, not just those about Tarzan, and read every one of them. He subsequently devoured every Agatha Christie novel. Dozens of them.
It’s the birthday of American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875) (books by this author), born in Chicago, creator of the popular fictional character Tarzan, King of the Apes. Burroughs was working in Chicago as a pencil-sharpener salesman when he decided to try his hand at writing for pulp magazines. He said, “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten.” His efforts began appearing in All-Story Magazine (1912) and were a hit, influencing future science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury.
He was also secretly at work on an adventure story about a young boy in the jungles of West Africa. John Clayton, heir to the House of Greystoke, is adopted by kindly great apes after his parents die. The apes name the baby “Tarzan,” which means “white skin” in ape language. The boy is reared by the apes and learns the ways of the jungle. He also finds his parents’ abandoned cabin and their books, and he teaches himself to read and speak English.
Tarzan of the Apes was an instant success upon publication (1914). Burroughs made so much money he formed his own publishing house and bought land in California that eventually became the city of Tarzana.
The character captured the public’s imagination, spawning more than 40 novels, a comic book series, and numerous Hollywood films, which made Burroughs unhappy, because the films portrayed Tarzan as a savage. In the books, he is an erudite and wealthy heir to a noble English fortune.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten.” That’s funny.
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It entered my mind this morning that today marks the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939. Sort of adds a twist to the trip to Wisconsin by our president. When will he attempt the Reichstag fire?
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I have wondered what he and Putin and Miller and Barr might be plotting for their October Revolution.
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I read a lot of ERB’s books when I was in middle and high school. My favorite was John Carter of Mars. John Carter was the lead character in the first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, set on a fictionalized version of Mars known as Barsoom. Written between July and September 28, 1911.
Note: I just read that the 12th book in the Barsoom series will be released in Spring 2020. Its title will be John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten.
To be clear, I am not that old. I was reading these books in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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Burroughs was a virulent racist. His town in California, Tarzana, was a sundown town…. allowed no African Americans. His portrayal of a privileged white man being the kindly master of the jungle and the inferior natives who lived in it for centuries was the epitome of colonialist attitude…..
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Douglas, I take your point but if we stopped reading anyone who was a racist, our library shelves would have few books on them. If we then removed the books of sexists and homophobes, there would not be much left.
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Heidegger was a Nazi, and he was a TERRIBLE writer, but I’ve read him because he had interesting things to say. He’s my go-to example of a TRULY DISGUSTING HUMAN BEING who had some good ideas. However, the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi affects my reading of him, as I think it should, and I can’t stand Wagner, for when I listen to his music, every time, I think of Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, listening to Wagner in the evenings after his day’s work. The mystical myth of the triumphal return to ascendance of the Aryan folk–the sick mythos that Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels were peddling–had some of its origins in overblown German Romanticism. It’s surprising that Trump hasn’t adopted this as the theme music for his rallies.
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I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t read Burroughs…. or anyone….. I’m not about censorship. But I do note that characters like Tarzan were part of a culture that made and makes it ok for white supremacy to stay in place as it helps to shape the images we have about the world….. I watched those Tarzan movies too, and Disney versions of the Mexican War, for example, in Davy Crockett and it was part of my mis education, and I am sure I was not alone in that.
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I loved the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books. I’m sorry but also glad to learn about his racism, I always want to be aware. I remember wondering as a kid how someone could learn to read and speak from written materials without hearing the words or at least having an illustrated dictionary to see that those weird shapes have meaning. Still wouldn’t explain speech, of course.
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