Edgar Rice Burroughs

Born Edgar Rice Burroughs on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, the fourth son of George Tyler Burroughs, a Union Civil War major turned battery manufacturer, he was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover and the Michigan Military Academy, failed the West Point entrance exam in 1895, and enlisted with the 7th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant in Arizona Territory before a diagnosed heart condition forced his discharge in 1897. There followed fifteen years of failed jobs: cowhand on his brother's Idaho ranch, manager of a Snake River gold dredge, railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, pencil-sharpener wholesaler. By thirty-six, with a wife and two children and almost no money, he began reading pulp magazines and decided he could write rot at least as good as theirs. A Princess of Mars, serialised in All-Story magazine in 1912 under the name Norman Bean, launched the John Carter cycle; Tarzan of the Apes, in the same magazine that October, gave him a character who would carry twenty-four sequels and the most successful merchandising operation in American genre fiction. The Warlord of Mars (1914) closed the first Martian trilogy. He bought a ranch in the San Fernando Valley that gave its name to Tarzana, became one of the first writers to incorporate himself as a corporation, and served as the oldest war correspondent in the Pacific theatre after Pearl Harbor, at sixty-six. His fiction's open embrace of eugenic theory has not aged well. He died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, at the age of seventy-four, while reading the Sunday comics in his Encino bed.

In 1911, thirty-six and running a failing lead-pencil-sharpener agency in Chicago, Burroughs spent his afternoons waiting for salesmen who never sold anything to report back. In those idle hours, by his own account, he picked up a pencil and began writing a story he called Under the Moons of Mars. It became A Princess of Mars.