Tarzan of the Apes

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer of adventure fiction who was born in 1875 and died in 1950. Burroughs is known for creating Tarzan and the character John Carter from the Barsoom stories. He was born in Chicago and lived much of his life in the suburb of Oak Park. As a young man, he attempted to enlist in the military but was discharged due to a heart condition. He then tried his hand at a variety of different jobs, including ranching, gold prospecting, and selling pencil sharpeners. He began writing adventure stories to sell to pulp magazines around 1911 after being encouraged by the low quality of most published stories at the time. His works were well received, particularly by young boys who were often the primary audience for pulp adventure fiction. While Burroughs claimed that the story of Tarzan was inspired by the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, a pair of noble infants raised by a wolf in the wilderness, Rudyard Kipling speculated in his posthumously published autobiography that Burroughs had “‘jazzed’ the motif of the Jungle Books” (Something of Myself, Macmillan and Co, 1937, p. 219). Despite the similarities between the two stories of human children being raised in the jungle by animals, Burroughs denied having ever read The Jungle Book.