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Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a businessman. He was educated at a number of local schools, and during the Chicago influenza epidemic in 1891 spent a half year on his brothers' ranch on the Raft River in Idaho. He then attended the Phillips Academy in Andover and then the Michigan Military Academy. Graduating in 1895, and failing the entrance exam for West Point, he ended up as an enlisted soldierCorporal, armed with an MP-5) A soldier is a person who has enlisted with, or was conscripted into, the armed forces of a sovereign country and has undergone training and received equipment to defend that country or its interests. Soldiers are a part of s with the Seventh Cavalry in ArizonaArizona was the 48th state admitted to the United States and is part of the Southwest United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, south and east of the Colorado River, bordering New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California and Mexico. Its major cities ar. After being diagnosed with a heartThis page is about the muscular organ, the Heart . For other meanings of the word, see Heart (disambiguation). The heart ( Latin cor is a hollow, muscular organ that pumps blood through the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions. The term cardia problem and thus found ineligible for promotion to officer class, he was discharged in 1897Events January 1 Brooklyn, New York merges with New York City. January 4 A British force is ambushed by Chief Ologbosheri, son-in-law of the Oba of Benin. This leads to a Punitive Expedition against Benin. February 2 The Pennsylvania state capitol is dest.
What followed was a string of seemingly unrelated and short stint jobs. Following a period of drifting and ranch work in Idaho, Burroughs found work at his father's firm in 1899Events January events January 1 End of Spanish rule in Cuba. January 1 Queens and Staten Island merge with New York City. January 3 The first known use of the word " automobile", in an editorial in the New York Times''. January 6 Lord Curzon becomes a vic. He married Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. In 1904 he left his job and found less regular work, initially in Idaho but soon back in Chicago.
By 1911, after seven years of low wages, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and began to write fiction. By this time Burroughs and Emma had two children, Joan and Hulbert. During this period, he had copious spare time and he began reading many pulp fiction magazines and claimed:
Aiming his work at the 'pulp' magazines then in circulation, his first story "Under the Moons of Mars" was serialized in All-Story magazine in 1912 and earned Burroughs US$400.
Burroughs soon took up writing full-time and by the time the run of "Under the Moons of Mars" had finished he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes which was published from October 1912 and went on to become his most successful brand. In 1913, Burroughs and Emma welcomed their third and last child, John Coleman.
Burroughs also wrote popular science fiction/ fantasy stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets (notably Barsoom, Burroughs' fictional name for Mars), lost islands, and into the interior of the hollow earth in his Pellucidar stories, as well as westerns and historical romances. Along with All-Story, many of his stories were published in the Argosy Magazine.
Tarzan was a cultural sensation when introduced. Burroughs was determined to capitalize on Tarzan's popularity in every way possible. He planned to exploit Tarzan through several different media including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, movies and merchandise. Experts in the field advised against this course of action, stating that the different media would just end up competing against each other. Burroughs went ahead, however, and proved the experts wrong—the public wanted Tarzan in whatever fashion he was offered. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon.
In 1923 Burroughs set up his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and began printing his own books through the 1930s. He divorced Emma in 1934 and married Florence Dearholt in 1935. They divorced in 1942. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor he was a resident of Hawaii and, despite being a sexagenarian, he spent the conflict as a war correspondent. He died in Encino, California on March 19, 1950 having written almost seventy novels.
The town of Tarzana, California was named after Tarzan. In 1919 Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California which he named "Tarzana". The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when their town was incorporated in 1928.
The Burroughs crater on Mars is named in Burroughs' honor.