From a June 30, 1930 Entry in our ERB Bio Timeline Project
Correspondence to sell That Damned Dude include this anecdote found in a letter to Collier's Weekly: "Your telegram of (January 9, 1930) has been lying in the mountains near Cedar City, Utah, for over five months, in the wrecked mail plane of Captain Maurice Graham, who was lost in a heavy blizzard on January 10th. His plane was found a few days ago, but no trace of Graham has been discovered. I have kept the envelope to add to a number of  mementos that I have preserved of Captain Graham, with whom I flew to Salt Lake City in February, 1927. It is rather a coincidence that I was about to write you relative to a story on which I am now working. It is a modern Western, located on a dude ranch in Arizona. While it will be finished in a few weeks, it will not be required for book publication necessarily for some time, as I am two years or more ahead of my book publishers.  . . . There are a couple of reasons why this story may have value in addition to whatever entertainment qualities are inherent in it. In the first place, my early experience and inclinations were such that I should have written Westerns exclusively. For some time during my youth I worked as a cow puncher; afterward I soldiered in the 7th United States Cavalry in Arizona, and later still I ran a store in a cattle country in Idaho. Further, just at present, my stories and my name are receivng unusually wide publication through the Tarzan illustrated strips that are running in some hundred and ten newspapers in all of the larger cities of the United States; nor ever since I started to write have my books enjoyed a greater sale, which seems to be increasing rather than diminishing." Collier's rejected the story. The story was also rejected by Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Ladies Home Journal, Blue Book, Argosy (twice), College Humor, Short Stories. Five years later he re-submitted the manuscript to Liberty under the title "The Brass Heart" using the pseudonym John Mann. Liberty rejected it again. The story eventually saw print in Thrilling Adventures in 1940.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the immortal TARZAN OF THE APES, now lives in Tarzana, California, the town which got its name from the character he created. "Tarzana" was the name given by Edgar Rice Burroughs to his vast ranch in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, and, subsequently, when the post office was established in the community surrounding the Burroughs ranch, the Federal Government aptly named it Tarzana. 

Better recognition of his contribution to the entertainment of countless millions of people no man could have!

Fifty-one Burroughs novels have been written by Mr. Burroughs to date!  Now in this March issue of THRILLING ADVENTURES, begins the fifty-second -- a richly colored, warmly human, blood-quickening action novel of the Far West!

THRILLING ADVENTURES is proud and happy to publish a novel by America's best-known writer, whose work now appears in fifty-seven languages and dialects throughout the world, and whose great character-creation, Tarzan, has been seen by movie-goers of all nations.