“If you write one story, it may be bad. If you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”
—Edgar Rice Burroughs
When I was about twelve years old, my aunt gave me the first five books in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series as a gift for either my birthday or Christmas (I can never remember which from one year to the next, because the two events are less than a week apart). They were part of the Bantam paperback series of the 1970s that remains popular among collectors to this day, largely because of the brilliant cover illustrations by Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo. It took me several years – decades, actually – but I eventually scoured enough used bookstores and paperback conventions to collect the entire 24-book Tarzan series.
Along the way, I also collected Burroughs’ other sci-fi adventure series in paperback: John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, Pellucidar, and others. Burroughs covers a substantial amount of shelf space in my office library.
Full confession: I’ve read many of the books – the entire 11-book John Carter saga in particular – but I have yet to read all the series in their entirety, because they’re a small fraction of a paperback collection that spans numerous genres and fills every wall of my office (and a few storage boxes too). But I can say that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Burroughs books that I have read.
What I admire most about his writing is its directness and accessibility. He had no formal training in the craft – which, to me, was always a big part of his appeal. He just had an innate understanding of how to tell a story.
Born 150 years ago this week – on September 1, 1875 – Burroughs discovered his calling a bit later in life than what was typical for his time. After a brief stint in the 7th U.S. Cavalry in his early twenties (he was discharged within a year due to a heart condition), he worked as a cowboy in Idaho, a gold mine manager in Oregon, and a railroad policeman in Utah. He later launched several business ventures that eventually failed.
But things came together after he started dabbling in fiction writing in his mid-thirties. He sold “Under the Moons of Mars” to The All-Story magazine, which published it as a serial between February and July of 1912. The All-Story published Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” (also in installments) later that same year, and A.C. McClurg & Company later published Tarzan of the Apes as a novel in 2014. After three more Mars serials and the success of the early Tarzan novels, McClurg published “Under the Moons of Mars” as a novel in October 1917, retitled A Princess of Mars.
By 1920, Tarzan was a national sensation, and Burroughs was one of the most popular fiction writers in America.
Veteran science fiction writer and editor Mike Resnick (1942-2020) wrote a substantive introduction to a 1999 edition of Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, a collection of all three stories in the Caspak trilogy published in a single volume by Bison Books. Resnick’s essay offers an excellent summation of Burroughs’ talents and his contribution to popular literature.
“Edgar Rice Burroughs was a pulp writer,” he says. “That’s not a pejorative – so were Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury, to name a pair of writers who stack up to any temporary darling of the New York Literary Establishment. I’ll tell you something else too. Burroughs wrote from 1912 to 1948, and while almost all of the Pulitzer Prize winners from those years are long since out of print, just about every word of fiction Burroughs wrote, more than sixty novels, is still available. Even today, kids can (and frequently do) pick up a seventy-five-year-old Tarzan or Mars book and not find it at all archaic or old-fashioned.”
Further into the introduction, Resnick mentions Burroughs’ skill at getting the hell out of the way and allowing the reader a direct experience of the story: “Writing for the widest possible audience, the very best pulp authors, unlike the more fashionable literary authors, were all but invisible. Burroughs is hardly intrusive in his first few books, and totally unintrusive for his last sixty or so.”
Resnick mentions other positive aspects of Burroughs’ writing that have stood the test of time: brisk pacing, convincing character development, highly detailed world building, and parallel narratives arranged in a compelling cliffhanger fashion. These are some of the best skills that any fiction writer could hope to master.
At the time of his death in 1950, Burroughs had compiled a body of work that included something close to eighty novels and novellas – mostly science fiction and adventure series, but also a few standalone works that included westerns, historical novels and contemporary dramas set in the early decades of 20th century urban America. Given this sizable bibliography, his simple but dead-on accurate framing of literary success as a numbers game is something I’ve kept in the forefront of my consciousness for more than a decade.
As of this month, I have written and published three novels, all of which have earned generally favorable reviews and afforded me a small following of readers who actually look forward to the next one (which should be out by the end of 2025 if all goes as planned). Ten of my short stories have been published in various small-press anthologies, and at least one more is expected to see the light of day in just a couple months.
That’s nowhere near a hundred stories, but it’s quite a bit more than one. And more will be coming in 2026 and beyond. Based on Burroughs’ philosophy, I’d say my odds are not bad – and they’re getting better all the time.