The wild life and legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1997)

Biographer John Taliaferro asserts it would be foolhardy to read an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel merely as a children’s story. The former Texas Monthly and Newsweek editor proves his point in this engaging, well-researched biography of Tarzan’s creator, a man most people know little about — and whom many mistakenly assume was British.

He wasn’t. When Tarzan of the Apes was published in 1912, the former pencil-sharpener salesman from Chicago became a 36-year-old overnight sensation. By his death in 1950, Burroughs was the most widely read American author of the century. So how did Tarzan become an international icon?

According to Taliaferro, it wasn’t just because Burroughs was a clever storyteller weaving “stupendous action,” but because every culture has a “wild child” archetype — from the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus to Kipling’s Mowgli. 

The arrival of any new Tarzan tale was hotly anticipated. Taliaferro credits Tarzan’s immense popularity to Burroughs’ shrewd use of what we now call media synergy. Decades before it became commonplace, Burroughs negotiated serialization rights, movies, a Tarzan comic strip, dolls and fan clubs. 

As demonstrated in his previous biography of cowboy painter Charles M. Russell, Taliaferro really enjoys his homework. In Tarzan Forever, he suggests Burroughs had impeccable timing, tapping into the post-Victorian era’s burning question — heredity versus environment. 

A striking revelation: Burroughs was enamored with eugenics, a Darwinian fringe movement dedicated to improving humanity through selective breeding. Although Burroughs would later change his views, he once wrote a column for the L.A. Examiner calling for the extermination of all “moral imbeciles.” To any Tarzan reader armed with this knowledge, Nature and Nurture intermingle in the novels much more intriguingly. (After all, Tarzan himself is the son of English nobility, possessing a superior bloodline despite dwelling among animals.)

And Burroughs was prolific. Constantly seeking new adventures for his international pop-culture icon, Burroughs completed many of his 70-plus novels in a matter of weeks, sometimes writing an astounding 400,000 words per year. Although the quality of these tales often varied wildly, the action never ceased.

In most plotlines, Tarzan and/or Jane Porter would encounter secret tribes or races, such as “The Leopard Men” or a lost band of English crusaders sent to liberate the Holy Land. The print version of Tarzan more often reflects the classical education of his creator; in one of countless specific examples from the novels, Tarzan learns Latin in three weeks so as to communicate with the leaders of a lost Roman empire.

“I am always late to the thrill,” Burroughs once said of his own life. “I always get to the fire after it is out.” He was accepted to West Point but failed the entrance exam, and didn’t set foot in Africa until well after the Tarzan books were bestsellers. He was a witness at Pearl Harbor, and failed twice in marriage. He was a cavalryman in the Arizona Territory, was the oldest American war correspondent in the South Pacific, and spent enough of his fortune to force himself to have to develop his beloved ranch, Tarzana, into what is today a Los Angeles suburb.

Yet he lived a colorful life, sparked by a prodigious imagination. Though Burroughs tried other genres (Mars sci-fi was a particular fascination), he always returned to young Lord Greystoke. The Tarzan books endure, even though Tarzan lives on mainly in Disney’s pantheon, and most people think of Burrough’s noble savage as the loin-clothed, monosyllabic oaf Hollywood made him out to be. John Taliaferro’s entertaining book shows in rich detail why this misperception is indeed a pity.