One Summer: America, 1927

Lackawana, Pennsylvania, and later Altadena, California, and wrote two or sometimes three books a year. He produced some ninety-five books altogether, and left so many manuscripts when he died, suddenly of a heart attack in 1939, that Harper & Brothers was still publishing new Zane Grey books fourteen years later. At his peak he earned $500,000 a year. In 1927, he made just under $325,000. For purposes of comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his best year, earned $37,599.
     
    Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tamer life than Grey – but then, after all, who didn’t? – but wrote racier stuff. Three years younger than Grey, Burroughs was born in 1875 into a well-off family in Chicago, but he was something of a black sheep and struggled to find a role for himself in life. He went west as a young man and tried store-keeping, ranching, panning for gold and working as a railway policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-six, he produced his first hit, Tarzan of the Apes .
    Burroughs was no hack. He used pulp fiction plots, but wrote with a certain panache, as if he didn’t quite understand the genre.Here are the opening lines to Tarzan of the Apes :
     
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own sceptical incredulity for the balance of the strange tale.
     
    It is perhaps not Tolstoy, but it is certainly far removed from the usual simply worded, straight-into-the-action openings of most cheap fiction of the day. In a career that lasted almost forty years, Burroughs produced some eighty books, including twenty-six Tarzan novels, a great deal of science fiction and a few westerns. All his efforts were characterized by exhilarating action, lightly clad females and an unwavering attachment to eugenic ideals. Tarzan himself could have been the poster boy for the eugenics movement. Tarzan , as many readers will surely know already, is the story of an aristocratic English infant who is left orphaned in the African jungle and is brought up by apes. Fortunately, because he is white and Anglo-Saxon, he is innately brave, strong, decisive and kind, instinctively ethical, and clever enough to solve any problem. He even teaches himself to read – quite a feat considering that he speaks no human language and doesn’t know what a book is when he first sees one. Thank goodness for racial superiority.
    The creation or maintenance of superior beings is something that preoccupied Burroughs throughout his career. Nearly all his outer space books are concerned with the breeding of master races on Mars or Venus. fn1 In Lost on Venus , he writes admiringly of asociety in which ‘no defective infant was allowed to live’ and citizens who were ‘physically, morally or mentally defective were rendered incapable of bringing their like into the world’. Back on earth, writing as himself in an article in the Los Angeles Examiner , he insisted that the world would be a better place if all ‘moral imbeciles’ were systematically eliminated. He even titled one of his books Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid . Oskaloosa was the birthplace of Harry H. Laughlin.
    As time went on, Burroughs became increasingly slapdash. He recycled plots and was often arrestingly careless with his prose. His lone novel of 1927, The War Chief , begins:
     
Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior leaped and danced to the beating of drums.
     
    Four paragraphs later we get:
     
Naked, but for a G-string, rough sandals, a bit of hide, and a buffalo headdress, a savage warrior moved silently among the boles of great trees.
     
    Occasionally he just slipped into drivel. Here is a Martian warrior named Jeddak whispering sweet nothings to Thuvia, Maid of Mars, in a book of that title in 1920:
     
Ah, Thuvia of Ptarth, you are cold even before the fiery blasts of my consuming love! No harder than your heart, nor colder is the hard, cold ersite of this thrice happy bench which supports your divine and fadeless form!
     
    Such passages could run on for some time. It hardly seemed to matter. People were still devotedly buying his stuff when he died in California of a heart attack in March 1950, aged seventy-four.
     
    Among serious writers of fiction, only Sinclair Lewis enjoyed robust sales in the summer of