Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 1950) was an American author best known for creating two of the twentieth century's most enduring pulp heroes: Tarzan, the feral lord of the African jungle, and John Carter, the Civil War veteran swept across space to the dying world of Barsoom. A failed pencil-sharpener salesman who turned to fiction in his mid-thirties, Burroughs sold his first story in 1912 and went on to write nearly eighty novels of adventure, romance, and scientific fantasy, pioneering the planetary-romance genre and helping shape modern science fiction and fantasy. His vivid imagination, breakneck pacing, and gift for worldbuilding won him a global readership and inspired generations of writers, filmmakers, and dreamers.
