It can be hard to recognize how much we owe Burroughs: Tarzan was not only an adventure story, but an environmental morality tale with a critique of industrial society and an image of the "natural" man. And although Burroughs is sometimes thought of these days as a writer for children or teenagers -- a writer from a simpler, less sophisticated era than our own -- one can find in his writing the antecedents of many contemporary strains of thought, including assumptions about who we are and our place in the world. The value of an unsullied natural environment and the sympathy for the animal kingdom mark Burroughs as ecologically-minded long before that term came into common use. Even his Westerns and space operas have a moral dimension in which the Western, "civilized" values and view of life are called into question and challenged.

Above all, Burroughs the writer was an entertainer, and in his creative life we see the beginnings of today's modern entertainment industry: he "branded" both himself and his creations, most especially Tarzan, and he diversified from pulp magazines and novels into radio, films, comic strips and pioneered the commercial product tie-in. As in most of Hollywood--where much of his work came into being in its most popular and accessible form -- we find in Burroughs the intersection of art and commerce, the alpha and omega of contemporary culture.

One advantage of his boring managerial job, however: there wasn't much to do, and he spent a lot of time reading adventure stories in the popular pulp magazines of the day. Before long, he decided he could make up stories as good – or at least as "rotten," as he later put it – as the ones he was reading, and he determined to give it a try.

He began his first story in the summer of 1911. "Under the Moons of Mars" was accepted for publication in November, 1911 and serialized in The Munsey Company's All-Story Magazine beginning in February, 1912. Burroughs received $400 for the rights to it, approximately $9280 in today's dollars.

Flush with the success of his first effort, Burroughs wrote a second story for All-Story, "Tarzan of the Apes." When it was accepted for publication and he received the above check for $700 (about $16,200 today) he realized that he might actually be able to make a living writing these stories and set out to do so.

As Burroughs' popularity grew, so did the the amounts on the checks arriving regularly from the Munsey Company, and by the mid teens, Burroughs was a wealthy man. In 1916, Burroughs, now financially secure, indulged in his lifelong love for adventure and took his family on a long touring and camping expedition through the American west to California. Burroughs maintained a detailed journal of the trip and later typed and bound the manuscript, along with photographs, into a unique, self-published, travelogue titled "Camping Out."

In 1923, in an effort to further cut his expenses and tighten creative control of his work, Burroughs became one of the first artists to incorporate, forming Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., which to this day handles the licensing of Burroughs' characters and stories. Despite the growing number of projects and business ventures Burroughs took on, his written output in the 1920s did not slacken. The decade saw some of his most imaginative and varied output, including westerns and plays.

Burroughs' Hollywood career reached its zenith in the early 1930s when he entered into an agreement with MGM to produce a series of movies starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. The success of these movies facilitated the further expansion of the Tarzan empire into radio, comics and merchandise. In the mid-1930s Burroughs, with Ashton Deerholt, formed a film production company, Burroughs-Tarzan Pictures, to produce his own movies as well as other non-Burroughs films. After a disastrous experience filming The New Advenures of Tarzan on location in Guatemala in 1935, Burroughs-Tarzan Pictures was quickly saddled with a debt burden from which it never fully recovered, and the company was out of business before the end of 1937. As the 1930s closed, an aging Burroughs, seeking more relaxation and thrift, departed from California and became a resident of Hawaii.

Burroughs immediately volunteered his service in the war effort and was accepted as a war corespondent, one of the war's oldest. Just five days after the attack, Burroughs began writing a column for the Honolulu Advertiser and Star-Bulletin called "Laugh It Off." Intended as a morale booster, the column featured humorous stories detailing the trials and tribulations of living in Martial Law Hawaii, where blackouts, rationing and curfews were mandatory throughout the war. But Burroughs quickly became fatigued with military censors stripping what he considered the substance from his columns and, feeling he could make a greater impact elsewhere, he moved on from "Laugh It Off" in early 1942.

Over the course of his war writing there is an evident shift in Burroughs' viewpoint of the Japanese Hawaiians. The suspicion and prejudices exhibited by Burroughs at the war's beginning were, by 1943, replaced by a more reasoned reappraisal of the Japanese Hawaiians, which earned him praise from many their civic leaders. The refutation of his past opinions were expressed in a candid article for the magazine Hawaii published June 30, 1944.

Explore the huge inventory from this collection -- 3,000 items.  A large archive of material spanning the whole of Burroughs' life, with emphasis on his career as a writer from the 1920s to the 1940s. Several thousand items including correspondence, unpublished manuscript material, photographs, and other memorabilia from his life and work. Thirty-three large binders sorted by date, plus additional unsorted extra material and a number of printed works. An archive that documents, week by week and sometimes day by day, ERB's life and work.  See the detailed list of items in this archive at:
www.ERBzine.com/mag41/4168b.html
The collection is for sale at Lopezbooks.com for $375,000.