Dale K. Robinson
A science fiction tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure
-- From a letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs from Ulysses Paxton,
dated Helium, June 8, 1925, in The Master Mind of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs is the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, a world-wide favorite who has been immortalized in books and films. I was less than enamored with Tarzan as a kid. I avoided the Tarzan novels for many years because of the treatment Tarzan had received on screen. I had no use for a monosyllabic ape-man. When I finally read my first Tarzan story, I was astonished by the richness of the story. It wasn't at all like the films!
But Tarzan wasn't my first introduction to the real ERB. I stumbled across a book entitled The Gods of Mars in a used bookstore in the early 1970s and was introduced to John Carter of Mars and the rich world of Barsoom that Burroughs had created. And from there I was hooked! I devoured the books featuring John Carter and his incomparable princess, Dejah Thoris. Unfortunately, there were only 12 in the series. Looking for more of the same, I visited Burroughs' Pellucidar, a world at the Earth's core where savage men live alongside creatures long extinct on the surface world. From Pellucidar, I traveled to Venus to experience the misadventures of Carson Napier. Running out of other places to visit, I finally joined Tarzan on an expedition to the Earth's core. And I met not the celluloid Tarzan, but Tarzan of the Books, as I recounted above.
How did it start? Burroughs, reading a pulp magazine, remarked that if the pulp writers could write such rot and be paid for it, he could write something just as rotten!
Burroughs began his first story early in 1911. It was influenced by the popular theories of astronomer Percival Lowell. The story was so improbable he signed it "Normal Bean" to signify he was not insane. ERB sent it to Thomas Newell Metcalf, editor of All-Story, where it was accepted immediately. Metcalf changed the title to "Under the Moons of Mars" and ran it in six installments February to July 1912. A copy editor, assuming an error, changed ERB's nom de plume to Norman Bean. The pun spoiled, ERB dropped the alias permanently. He received $400 for his story, a staggering sum at the time.
Metcalf sensed untapped potential and suggested ERB write a story along the lines of Arthurian legend. ERB obliged with a Gothic romance entitled "The Outlaw of Torn." All-Story rejected it (eventually sold to Street & Smith's New Story Magazine in 1914). He had begun a third story "Tarzan of the Apes" in December 1911 and finished May 1912. Metcalf published it complete in one issue of All-Story, October 1912. ERB received $700, resulting in a decision to take up writing full time.
And this is my tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose creations influenced people like science fiction writers Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton and scientist Carl Sagan.
And me.