Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was the creator of a multitude of fictional worlds which transformed the face of imaginative and speculative fiction during the decades between 1911 and his death in 1950. His most famous and enduring character is Tarzan of the Apes. There's darn few places in the world where the name and story of Tarzan are unknown. The many films portraying the human raised by apes in Africa have made Tarzan a household word. But Tarzan and his mysterious jungle isn't the only character from the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter of Mars ranks very high as an influence upon modern science fiction and two other series, The Land That Time Forgot and At The Earth's Core were made into action adventure movies in the mid-1970s. He took us to Venus and Jupiter and to Poloda--450,000 light years from Earth. Ed Burroughs also found quite a bit to write about the people and places of our planet: European nations on the cusp of World War I, the South Pacific, the Wild West, Texas and Mexico, Chicago, California, Utah, Idaho and dozens of other places which do not come immediately to mind as I prepare this introduction. What Edgar Rice Burroughs did best was adventure romances. There's a guy and a gal and evil afoot. Right and wrong are in contast battle, and personal choices and sacrifices must be made to win the girl, squash the evil, and right the wrongs. Each book or story is based in the classic terms of legend and literature--complicated adventure but rarely complicated for understanding. This American author has been published in many languages and reprinted so often that millions of copies exist world wide--not bad for a failed businessman who turned to writing at the age of 35 because he felt he could write equally as bad as the authors of the pulps and because he had a great desire to feed his family. In case you haven't guessed by now, I'm an ERB fanzie(tm). That's a "fan in a frenzy." I have several ERB web sites devoted to various aspects of this writer's life and career, check them out after you've mined ERBmania! The Author - Tangor's essay on Edgar Rice Burroughs The Heroes - Meet the characters from the books The Heroines - Meet the characters from the books
The Worlds The Company
A Barsoom Glossary 
This site is a member of the ERB Ring Circle of Web Sites.
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