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Tarzan Forever : The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan
In Tarzan The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Creator of Tarzan , John Taliaferro vividly recounts the remarkable life and career of the originator of Tarzan.
Drawn extensively from Burroughs's own correspondence, memos, and manuscripts, Taliaferro's richly detailed narrative reveals how Burroughs, a down-on-his-luck Chicago pencil-sharpener salesman, first wrote about his most famous character, how he grasped the appeal of this "feral god," and how he spent the rest of his life nurturing and protecting it.
Drawn extensively from Burroughs's own correspondence, memos, and manuscripts, Taliaferro's richly detailed narrative reveals how Burroughs, a down-on-his-luck Chicago pencil-sharpener salesman, first wrote about his most famous character, how he grasped the appeal of this "feral god," and how he spent the rest of his life nurturing and protecting it.
400 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 1999
71 people want to read
About the author
John Taliaferro
17 books30 followersA graduate of Harvard College, John Taliaferro is a former senior editor at Newsweek.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 15, 2011
I'm an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, and I'd have to say that when I first read his Tarzan series as a youngster and then his Barsoom (Mars) series, I was pretty sure I wanted to write stories like ERB. That is, full of action, adventure, and strange new worlds. Something to understand about ERB -- he was writing in an era when racism and sexism were overt, rampant, and often celebrated. ERB himself was a eugenicist, and Tarzan was first published in a magazine in 1912, after all. And I'll be the first to say that ERB's writing style wasn't scintillating. It got the job done, in an era of pulp. And the point of pulp was not to argue the finer points of writing style so much as to transport a reader into an adventure. And yes, you could spend DAYS in a lit crit class completely ripping ERB's work to shreds. But when I read his work as a kid, it resonated with my own wanderlust and desire to explore.
That said, I didn't know much about ERB the man, or what drove him or how he ended up writing the hundreds of pulp fiction stories and novels he did. He didn't actually start writing until he was 36, and when he did, it took him barely six months to create Tarzan, still one of the most recognizable figures in pop culture. Taliaferro brought that to light, and also showed how ERB's earlier series of boring jobs helped give him a strong managerial grounding that helped him solidify decent publishing deals then. So this book is also about the publishing industry in the early 'teens and beyond, and that aspect of it I also found intriguing. The business of publishing is something all writers eventually have to deal with, so learning something about how things worked then offered a nice contrast with how things work (and don't work) now.
So if you ever read ERB as a younger person, and you felt the pull of those stories, you might be interested in learning more about ERB the man. Taliaferro gives you a picture of him, warts and all.
That said, I didn't know much about ERB the man, or what drove him or how he ended up writing the hundreds of pulp fiction stories and novels he did. He didn't actually start writing until he was 36, and when he did, it took him barely six months to create Tarzan, still one of the most recognizable figures in pop culture. Taliaferro brought that to light, and also showed how ERB's earlier series of boring jobs helped give him a strong managerial grounding that helped him solidify decent publishing deals then. So this book is also about the publishing industry in the early 'teens and beyond, and that aspect of it I also found intriguing. The business of publishing is something all writers eventually have to deal with, so learning something about how things worked then offered a nice contrast with how things work (and don't work) now.
So if you ever read ERB as a younger person, and you felt the pull of those stories, you might be interested in learning more about ERB the man. Taliaferro gives you a picture of him, warts and all.
September 19, 2010
Very interesting, he never wrote until he was 36 after failing at everything else he tried. He became rhe most read author in the world but always struggled with money because of bad spending habits. He was also a racist and believed in eugenics , great story.
June 28, 2011
Good biography of the influences and work of ERB.
November 17, 2025
This is a solid and impressively well researched biography, but a bit tiresome. This wasn't the author's fault, it was Burroughs himself that was the problem.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (and other) novels had a huge cultural impact on generations of Americans. His first successful work, Tarzan Of The Apes, was the first novel that I read at the age of ten. I, like generations of adults and kids before me, was hooked on everything Tarzan. I spent a lot of time in the willow tree in our front yard, and swinging Tarzan-like on its rope swing.
But Burroughs himself, I learned this month, was a jerk. He was racist, a fan of eugenics who believed in the superiority of the white race. He was probably a functional alcoholic who left his deeply alcoholic wife for a woman half his age. He made what today would be millions of dollars only to squander much of it on elevating his social status, and was constantly near bankruptcy. At 64 he was the oldest war correspondent serving in World War Two, and traveled the Pacific Theater and yet never had a single one of of his two dozen articles he submitted ever published by the War Department, which meant that he was essentially on a government paid travel junket throughout the conflict.
I came away from the work with no admiration for the man. I expected after finishing this work I'd re-read that first Tarzan novel, but now I'm in no rush. The franchise has lost its appeal. Learning some years ago that two of the actors playing Tarzan in films, Jock Mahoney and Lex Barker, were alleged to have been child molesters didn't help much, even though that has nothing to do with Burroughs or the novels themselves. Childhood memories and fantasies are just that, and I've outgrown them, and that willow tree died long ago.
So, is the book worth reading? Absolutely. The books listed in the notes section at the end are themselves a great resource on the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And, it is all things Tarzan. The reader will come away with a greater appreciation of a fantasy pulp series that went international and was reprinted in languages all over the world, and is still read more than a hundred and ten years after its first appearance.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (and other) novels had a huge cultural impact on generations of Americans. His first successful work, Tarzan Of The Apes, was the first novel that I read at the age of ten. I, like generations of adults and kids before me, was hooked on everything Tarzan. I spent a lot of time in the willow tree in our front yard, and swinging Tarzan-like on its rope swing.
But Burroughs himself, I learned this month, was a jerk. He was racist, a fan of eugenics who believed in the superiority of the white race. He was probably a functional alcoholic who left his deeply alcoholic wife for a woman half his age. He made what today would be millions of dollars only to squander much of it on elevating his social status, and was constantly near bankruptcy. At 64 he was the oldest war correspondent serving in World War Two, and traveled the Pacific Theater and yet never had a single one of of his two dozen articles he submitted ever published by the War Department, which meant that he was essentially on a government paid travel junket throughout the conflict.
I came away from the work with no admiration for the man. I expected after finishing this work I'd re-read that first Tarzan novel, but now I'm in no rush. The franchise has lost its appeal. Learning some years ago that two of the actors playing Tarzan in films, Jock Mahoney and Lex Barker, were alleged to have been child molesters didn't help much, even though that has nothing to do with Burroughs or the novels themselves. Childhood memories and fantasies are just that, and I've outgrown them, and that willow tree died long ago.
So, is the book worth reading? Absolutely. The books listed in the notes section at the end are themselves a great resource on the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And, it is all things Tarzan. The reader will come away with a greater appreciation of a fantasy pulp series that went international and was reprinted in languages all over the world, and is still read more than a hundred and ten years after its first appearance.
May 29, 2020
This is a biography of the writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I enjoyed reading about what he did in real life and what influenced him to write about. Besides the Tarzan series, they talk about the Princess of Mars series. Also, found out that the city of Tarzana was really ERB's ranch home.
October 18, 2023
Well-researched, well-organized, and well-written biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was rather sad how little respect and income he had until the last years of his life.
September 17, 2015
I truly enjoyed this book. It WAS about Burroughs more than Tarzan but offered considerable insight into the creative aspects of ERB's work - including John Carter, David Innes, and Carson Napier. Well worth the read...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews