On March 26, 1923, Edgar Rice Burroughs became the first author to incorporate himself, founding Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., with its headquarters located on the property of his Tarzana ranch just a few miles from where I live in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. One hundred years later this past week, the corporation that he established is owned by his heirs and still going strong, promoting his literary legacy worldwide in film, television, publishing, theatrical stage productions, licensing, and merchandising.
If his name is not immediately familiar to you, Edgar Rice Burroughs (or ERB as he is affectionately known) was one of the most prolific, imaginative novelists of the 20th century – or any century, for that matter. He is best-known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, one of the most recognizable and enduring figures in pop culture history. Born in 1875 in the wake of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, ERB has been called by many the father of American science fiction. His 60+ novels, ripping tales of high adventure set everywhere from the earth’s core to the African veldt to the jungles of Venus, served as an inspiration for countless writers and scientists from Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury to Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall.
ERB’s work gave life to the pulp fiction genre. Tarzan was also the pioneer of the comic book superhero; his comic strip was introduced in 1929, tying with Buck Rogers as the first “serious” adventure strip (prior to that, comics were largely limited to funnies like the Katzenjammer Kids) and inspiring The Phantom and later, Superman and Batman.
I humbly credit Burroughs as the inspiration for my own love of reading and even my desire to become a writer. I discovered Tarzan of the Apes at the age of twelve, and the wildly inventive tale opened up a whole new world for me. I already enjoyed reading, but diving into that book was like a religious epiphany; when I realized that there were a couple of dozen more in the Tarzan series, not to mention dozens more action-packed ERB books featuring other pulp heroes like cavalry-captain-turned-Martian-swordsman John Carter, I became like a crack addict. Later of course, in high school and pursuing English and Humanities majors in college, I broadened my reading horizons with everything from ancient and modern classics to literary bestsellers, but I never again was thrilled and transported by fiction in quite the same way.
If you’ve never read Burroughs, allow me to recommend a handful of the many dozens of his books for a starting point. The language is a bit archaic (though far more accessible to today’s readers than, say, the swashbuckling epics of 19th century Alexandre Dumas), and ERB makes no claims to literary genius, though his prose is unusually sophisticated by pulp standards. But the novels are relentless page-turners overflowing with heroes who are men’s men of honor, the proud, beautiful women who love them, and villains undiluted by the kind of moral equivalence with which Hollywood likes to whitewash evil – all populating the dangerous, exotic landscapes of Burroughs’ trailblazing imagination.
Burroughs wrote his share of more straightforward adventure tales like The Mucker and westerns like Apache Devil, featuring bare-knuckled, brawling protagonists. My personal preference, however, is for the more fantastical material, so those are the ones I recommend here:
1) Tarzan of the Apes – If you read only one ERB book in your life, this must be the one, especially if your only exposure to the legend of Tarzan is through Hollywood’s appallingly distorting lens (the Johnny Weismuller films, probably the most well-known, are particularly misleading and embarrassing). Uncorrupted by the deceit and venality of “civilized” man, Tarzan is the very embodiment of the Noble Savage – literally noble. The polished, educated, son of English royalty (Burroughs’ creation was no “Me Tarzan, you Jane” halfwit), he itches to shed “the thin veneer of civilization” and return to the African trees of his youth at every opportunity.
In this first of a series of two dozen action-packed novels, Tarzan (his jungle name means “white skin”) is raised by great apes after the deaths of his aristocratic parents, who were abandoned on the African shore by mutineers. As a youth, his discovery of the cabin where he was born introduces him not only to the hunting knife that makes him the deadly equal of any jungle beast, but to the mystery of his true identity. One day another mutiny leaves behind a party of castaways including pretty American Jane Porter, who immediately captivates him. It is a love he eventually pursues all the way to America.
2) The Mars series – I’m going to cheat here and recommend not one but the first three of ERB’s eleven novels set on the red planet: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. Princess by itself feels incomplete and comparatively slow-paced; you need the full sweep of this entire unofficial trilogy to best appreciate this action epic. In the Martian books, soldier-of-fortune Carter is mystically transported to the dying Martian planet where he fights for and against alien races to win the heart of Princess Dejah Thoris, the most beautiful woman on two worlds. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of this series on the science fiction genre.
3) At the Earth’s Core – This is the first of seven books in the extraordinary Pellucidar series, featuring explorer David Innes in a world of prehistoric monsters and primeval warriors at the center of the hollow earth, where daylight is eternal and the horizons sweep upward into the clouds. Pellucidar is ruled by the flying, reptilian Mahars, who enslave the Stone Age humans – among them Dian the Beautiful, with whom Innes falls in love. In the process of winning Dian and attempting to return to the earth’s surface with her, he undertakes numerous adventures including leading a human revolt against the Mahars.
4) The Land That Time Forgot – This book – “perhaps the single most imaginative novel that Burroughs ever wrote,” claims award-winning science fiction novelist Mike Resnick – originally appeared in 1918 as three novellas before settling into book form in 1924. In the vein of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World or Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Burroughs relates the story of American Bowen Tyler and other castaways from a captured German U-boat during World War I that end up on a lost South Pacific island. “Caspak” is teeming with unique and terrible creatures extinct elsewhere, and inhabited by beast men in various stages of evolutionary development. When the submarine is retaken by the Germans, Tyler must find and rescue missing British passenger Lys La Rue and somehow get them off the island.
5) The Lost Continent – An allegory about the United States’ isolationism at the onset of World War I, this short novel (also known as Beyond Thirty) set in the year 2137 is the tale of Captain Jefferson Turck and the crew of his rather marvelous aero-submarine. They dare to leave behind a prosperous but sheltered and isolated America on an epic quest to rediscover the lost territory of old Europe, which has descended into wilderness and barbarism. The title “thirty” refers to the 30th longitude that inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere are forbidden to pass, upon pain of death.
For a biography of Burroughs and detailed examination of his works, check out Richard Lupoff’s Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If you’re really into it, there is the massive (and massively annotated) two-volume Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan by Irwin Porges.
You may well ask, what does this gushy fan tribute to a pulp fiction author have to do with our imperative here at Culture Warrior, to Make Western Civilization Great Again? Well, we live in a time of cynicism and contempt for the old-fashioned sort of noble ideals, romanticism, sense of adventure, and “toxic masculinity” that permeate ERB’s work. Making our civilization great again begins, I would argue, with reclaiming and valuing the sort of masculine, individualistic spirit that helped power our civilization in the first place (for more on this theme, see a previous article I wrote here, “Want Teenage Boys to Read? Give Them Books About Heroes”). Thankfully, we can still return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, as the old Lone Ranger TV theme put it, through the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. As Ray Bradbury put it in his homage to the master of adventure,
We may have liked Verne and Wells and Kipling, but we loved, we adored, we went quite mad with Mr. Burroughs. We grew up into our intellectuality, of course, but our blood always remembered.
A different version of this was originally posted at PJ Media here