Biography for
Edgar Rice Burroughs More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

1 September 1875, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Date of Death

19 March 1950, Encino, California, USA (heart attack)

Mini Biography

His father had been a major in the Union army during the Civil War. Edgar Rice Burroughs attended the Brown School then, due to a diphtheria epidemic, Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls, then the Harvard School, Phillips Andover and the Michigan Military Academy. He was a mediocre student and flunked his examination for West Point. He worked a variety of jobs all over the country: a cowboy in Idaho, a gold miner in Oregon, a railroad policeman in Utah, a department manager for Sears Roebuck in Chicago. He published "A Princess of Mars" under the title "Under the Moons of Mars" in six parts between February and July of 1912. The same "All-Story Magazine" put out his immediately successful "Tarzan of the Apes" in October of that year. Two years later the hardback book appeared, and on January 27, 1918, the movie opened on Broadway starring Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan. It was one of the first movies to gross over $1,000,000. Burroughs was able to move his family to the San Fernando Valley in 1919, converting a huge estate into Tarzana Ranch. He was in Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 and remained in Hawaii as a war correspondent. Afterward he returned home with a heart condition. On March 19, 1950, alone in his home after reading the Sunday comics in bed, he died. By then he had written 91 novels, 26 of which were about Tarzan. The man whose books have sold hundreds of millions of copies in over thirty languages once said "I write to escape ... to escape poverty".

IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan

Spouse

Florence Gilbert	(4 April 1935 - April 1941) (divorced)
Emma Hulbert	(1 January 1900 - December 1934) (divorced)

Trivia

Burroughs' second wife, Florence Gilbert, was earlier married to producer / actor Ashton Dearholt.

The city of Tarzana, California, where Burroughs spent the last years of his life, was named in honor of his most famous creation, Tarzan.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 47-51. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

An excellent guide to Burroughs' Mars books is "A Guide to Barsoom" by John Flint Roy.

City of Tarzan, Texas, was named in honor of his most famous creation, Tarzan.

Didn't start writing until the age of 35.

His first Mars book was written under the pseudonym Norman Bean.

Most of his stories are written in the first person.

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin once said that Edgar Rice Burroughs was his favorite author.

A publisher who had intended to reject Burroughs' book, "The Outlaw of Torn", wrote him to say, "My reviewer was up half the night reading it!"

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