He didn’t begin writing in any serious fashion until he was 35, but he immediately sold his first professional submission, A Princess of Mars. In this new biography of the creator of Lord Greystoke, the author not only recounts how a 36-year-old, down-on-his luck salesman dreamed up the tale of a boy raised by apes, but how that improbable yet powerful adventure shaped Burroughs’ career and private life for the next four decades.īorn in Chicago in 1875, Burroughs spent his early years as a cavalryman, a cowboy, and a gold prospector. With Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs devised one of popular culture’s most enduring icons, perhaps second only to Sherlock Holmes in terms of impact and universal recognition. TARZAN FOREVER: THE LIFE OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, CREATOR OF TARZAN, by John Taliaferro, Scribner, 400 pages, $30.00.
During the intervention at work where he tries to defend his indefensible behavior, his humorist’s eye can still observe his co-worker: “Rick is doing his best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath” (21).Book Review: TARZAN FOREVER: THE LIFE OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, CREATOR OF TARZAN (by John Taliaferro) : AH Close The author’s stories-vividly recounted in his memoir Running With Scissors and synopsized in Dry-are grist for Burroughs’s tragic mill, and yet his tone throughout both memoirs is detached and comic. With an abusive father addicted to alcohol, and a mother who abandoned Burroughs to her unethical psychiatrist when the boy was 13, Burroughs existed on the fringes he lived in chaos and squalor, never attended school, fended for himself, and survived the abuse of a 33-year-old sexual predator who lived on the premises. His childhood was bizarre and abusive enough to send anyone to the therapist’s couch. Certainly, he is not lacking in raw material. Emotional distance creates perspective through which we can examine past trauma through a fresh lens, and that lens for Burroughs is humor. Few comedians would have a career otherwise. The adage that comedy is tragedy plus time is appropriate in Burroughs’s case.
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