Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. As a young man, he tried a military career but failed the entrance exam for the West Point Academy. He enlisted as a private in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, remaining there until he was discharged in 1897.

At the beginning of 1900, Edgar Rice Burroughs married Emma Hulbert and for several years had various jobs and the couple moved to different places. With their children Joan and Hulbert to provide for, he found himself in a difficult period in which he struggled more and more to earn something. Emma’s third pregnancy made things even worse.

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs started writing the first novel of the John Carter / Barsoom series, “Under the Moons of Mars”, also known as “A Princess of Mars“. Years later, he stated that reading pulp magazines he was convinced that he could write stories just as entertaining and probably much more.

The first half of the novel was sent to the editor of the magazine “The All-Story”, who replied that he liked it and that if the second half was just as good he could use it. For Edgar Rice Burroughs the encouragement was decisive and after he finished the novel, sent the second part, receiving $400 as payment.

That event changed Edgar Rice Burroughs’ life as he decided to become a writer. In 1912 he also started writing the novel that introduced the most famous of the characters he invented, “Tarzan of the Apes”. It too was published in the magazine “The All-Story” with great success.

For Edgar Rice Burroughs those achievements were important because he needed to earn money from every novel he wrote to support his family, especially after the birth of his son John. For that reason, Tarzan’s story was immediately followed up, and in 1914 the story of John Carter also started becoming a series.

Given the considerable success of the Tarzan series, Edgar Rice Burroughs decided to exploit it going well beyond the many novels he wrote over the years. Tarzan became the star of comic books, cinema, and television productions with the creation of merchandise.

In 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs began a new series, Pellucidar, a world inside the Earth, with the novel “At the Earth’s Core”, also known as “The Inner World”, published for the first time in the magazine “All-Story Weekly”. In the same year, he published the novel “The Mucker”, the first in the series of the same name, again in the magazine “All-Story Weekly”.

Thanks to the growing success of his works, and in particular the Tarzan ones, Edgar Rice Burroughs bought a ranch north of Los Angeles and called it “Tarzana”. Over the years, other people came to live nearby, creating a community that was called Tarzana.

In 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs started a new series of interplanetary adventures, the cycle of Venus, called Amtor, with the novel “The Pirates of Venus” (“Pirates of Venus”), published in the journal “Argosy”. It is sometimes known as the cycle of Carson Napier of Venus. It has some similarities with the cycle of Mars but also contains satirical elements.

In 1934, Edgar Rice Burroughs divorced his wife Emma. In 1935 he married Florence Gilbert Dearholt, a marriage that lasted until 1942.

Edgar Rice Burroughs spent the following decades writing new novels for the series he had begun and others of various genres. Thanks to his success, he could open his own publishing house, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., to directly publish his own books.

Edgar Rice Burroughs died on March 19, 1950, following a heart attack. At that point, he had written nearly 80 novels. He started writing science fiction when such genre was still at its early stage and throughout his career, he developed much more the adventurous side of his stories than the scientific one. Indeed, his popularity is linked to that element due to his ability to reinterpret existing ideas in new ways.