Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was born in Chicago and failed at a long succession of jobs — cavalry trooper, gold dredger, railway policeman, pencil-sharpener salesman — before selling his first story at thirty-six. Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars both appeared in magazines in 1912; some two dozen Tarzan books followed, and the California ranch he bought with the proceeds gave its name to the town of Tarzana. In his late sixties he worked as a war correspondent in the Pacific.