posted by corporate_sunshine #
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The writer/creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars was born at this address on September 1, 1875.
The fourth son of Civil War veteran and businessman Major George Tyler Burroughs (1833–1913) and his wife Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs (1840–1920), Edgar Rice Burroughs attended several schools in the area until he left Chicago because of the influenza epidemic for his brother's ranch on the Raft River in Idaho.
In the ensuing years, Burroughs was a soldier in the Arizona Territory, performed ranch work, and worked for his father's firm. In 1911, he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler and was reading a great deal of pulp fiction. It was at this point that he decided to begin writing.
As he stated: "...if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."
