The Birth of Tarzan

The following is an article from Uncle John’s All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

Tarzan was the first modern superhero -the first pop icon whose fame spread to every corner of the globe. That makes him the forefather of Superman, Batman, Star Wars, Madonna, and Michael Jordan. “Before Tarzan,” writes one critic, “nobody understood just how big, how ubiquitous, how marketable a star could be.” Here is the inside story of how -and why- Tarzan came to be.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD

In 1911, a paunchy, balding, 35-year-old named Edgar Rice Burroughs took a job selling pencil sharpeners. He wasn’t very good at it; for that matter, he didn’t seem to be very good at anything. As a young man he was denied admittance to West Point, and from there he’d gone on to fail at a number of professions, including cow punching, gold mining, selling lightbulbs, running a news stand, advertising, and peddling quack medicine door-to-door.

“Two decades later,” John Taliaferro writes in Tarzan Forever, “when Burroughs drew up an outline for his autobiography, he summarized the period between 1905 and 1911 with a simple, dreary statement: ‘I am a flop.’”

KILLING TIME

A few years earlier, while selling a “remedy” for alcoholism door-to-door, Burroughs had been responsible for reading magazines to make sure the company’s ads appeared as promised and were error-free. “After our advertisements were checked,” he recalled later, “I sometimes took the magazines home to read” -a habit he kept up even after he switched jobs and began selling pencil sharpeners.

“There were several all-fiction publications among them,” Burroughs remembered, “and although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining, and probably more so, than any I read in those magazines. If people were paid for writing such rot as I read, I could write stories just as rotten.”

BEDTIME STORIES

Coming up with story ideas was no problem; the troubled Burroughs had become an insomniac. To distract himself as he lay in bed each night, he had developed the habit of telling himself adventure stories featuring heroes whose lives were nothing like his own. “While drifting through the unsatisfactory real world, Gabe Essoe writes, “Burroughs would console himself with a fantasy world in which he was handsome, virile, and capable of success, the idol of whole civilizations, beyond the limits of credulity.”

“Most of the stories I wrote,” he later admitted, “were stories I told myself just before I went to sleep.”

OUT OF THIS WORLD

Burroughs started work on his first story in July 1911, and by mid-August he’d completed a 43,000-word manuscript he called A Princess of Mars, about a Civil War veteran who falls into a trance in Arizona, wakes up on Mars, fights a war against the Martians, and then marries a Martian princess.

Burroughs was actually latching onto a popular topic of the early 1900s. In 1879, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli detected what he though were canali (“canals”) on the Martian surface; and in 1906 another astronomer, Percival Lowell, wrote a book that proposed that the canals were irrigation ditches built by an advanced race of Martians. People were excited by the prospect of life on the Red Planet …which was probably why Burroughs decided to write about it. He couldn’t afford typing paper -he had a wife and two babies to support and had just lost his job selling pencil sharpeners- so he wrote on the backs of old letterhead that he’d picked up at his brother’s stationery company.

PAYDAY

Burroughs finished the story and sent the manuscript to Argosy magazine, and with a few changes, A Princess of Mars was accepted for serial publication in Argosy’s sister publication, the All-Story. Price: $400. “I shall never make a million dollars,” Burroughs wrote in his autobiography, “but if I do it cannot possibly give me the thrill that that four-hundred dollar check gave me.”

Thomas Newell Metcalf, managing editor at All-Story, invited Burroughs to submit another story, “a serial of the regular romantic type, something like, say, Ivanhoe.” Three weeks later, Burroughs turned in a short story called “The Outlaw of Torn,” a 13th-century tale about a fictitious son of England’s King Henry II. But Metcalf didn’t like it, so it was shelved.

GOING APE

In March 1912, Burroughs wrote back to Metcalf that he was already at work on his next tale.

The story I am now on is of the scion of a noble English house -of the present time- who was born in tropical Africa where his parents died when he was about a year old. The infant was found and adopted by a huge she-ape, and was brought up among a band of fierce anthropods.

The mental development of this ape-man in spite of every handicap, of how he learned to read English without knowledge of the spoken language, of the way in which his inherent reasoning faculties lifted him above his savage jungle friends and enemies, of his meeting with a white girl, how he came at last to civilization and to his own makes fascinating writing and I think will prove interesting reading… The boy-child is called Tarzan, which is ape-talk for “white skin.”

Metcalf was impressed: “I think your idea for a new serial is cracker-jack and I shall be very anxious to have a look at it. You certainly have a most remarkable imagination of anybody whom I have run up against for some time.”

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Again, Burroughs’s story was built around popular topics of the day. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the mysterious continent of Africa, which had only recently began giving up its secrets to Western explorers.

It also reflected his interest in another popular theory of the day: eugenics. In 1869, ten years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his cousin, Francis Galton, wrote Hereditary Genius. In it, he argues that some human bloodlines were, by the law of natural selection, more advanced than others. According to Galton, the way a person could tell how advanced their bloodline was was to count the number of distinguished ancestors they had in their family tree: If you were descended from kings, Pilgrims, or the Founding Fathers, you were a member of a very advanced bloodline. If you were descended from criminals or peasants, you weren’t very evolved at all.

This book make Galton the father of "eugenics," the theory that “selective breeding” could be used to improve the bloodlines of the human race. By 1912, the eugenics movement was so strong that universities all over the country offered courses in it; one organization called the American Breeder’s Society had even begun compiling a list of "America’s Most Effective Blood Lines," literally a Who’s Who of natural selection.

Perhaps in response to his own personal failings, Burroughs liked to brag that he came from exceedingly "good stock" -he shared a common Pilgrim ancestor with American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, Morse code inventor Samuel Morse, and (future) president Calvin Coolidge. The greatest gift his mother gave him, he later wrote, was "the red blood of the Puritan and the Pioneer, bequeathed… uncontaminated."

It was this fascination with bloodlines and natural selection that drove the new story. Could good breeding triumph over adversity?

GOING TO PRESS

In May, Burroughs finished work on Tarzan of the Apes and sent it to Metcalf. “I did not think it was a good story,” Burroughs recalled, “and I doubted it would sell.” As he’d done so many times before, Burroughs was also beginning to doubt whether he really wanted to be a writer. “I was sort of ashamed of it as an occupation for a big, strong, healthy man,” he admitted later.

Metcalf disagreed with Burroughs’s appraisal of the story: Tarzan was good -very good, he wrote to Burroughs later that summer:

If you will stop and realize how many thousands and thousands of stories an editor has to read, day in, day out, you will be impressed when we tell you that we read this yarn at one sitting and had the time of our young lives. It is the most exciting story we have seen in a blue moon, and about as original as they make ‘em.

Neither Burroughs nor Metcalf had any idea just how good Tarzan of the Apes was until October, when the Tarzan issue hit the newsstands. Within just a few days, Tarzan letters began pouring into the All-Story offices praising the story …and begging for more.

CHECKS AND BALANCES

Burroughs was just getting started as an author, but his years of business experience, though financially disastrous, had given him a surprising amount of business savvy.

When the $400 check for his first story, A Princess of Mars, arrived from All-Story magazine in 1911, he noticed that the words “For All Rights” were typed on it. As far as Burroughs was concerned, he’d only sold the magazine the right to publish his story in their magazine -and for that matter, only once. “What other rights are there?” he wrote back before cashing the check (which would have implied that he accepted All-Story’s terms and was indeed signing over “all rights” to the story). Few authors -let alone first-time authors with an unbroken, 15-year string of business and career failures- had the sense to ask that question.

OVER A BARREL

All-Story could not publish A Princess of Mars without Burroughs’s consent, and after a flurry of correspondence, the magazine finally gave in. It sent Burroughs a letter agreeing that he would retain all rights to his characters and story after they published it once.

Refusing to cash that check until he’d won back the rights to his story -and then doing it again when he sold his first Tarzan story a few months later- were probably the most important business decisions of his entire career. They would earn him millions of dollars in the years to come. “Had Burroughs’s innate genius not guided him at this crucial stage,” Gabe Essie write-in Tarzan of the Movies, “he would have had nothing to sell to film in later years.”

In 1913, Burroughs made another smart move: he registered the name Tarzan as a trademark.

SHELF LIFE

Burroughs understood that the real money from Tarzan was in books, not magazines. Magazines disappeared from the newsstands after only a month or two; but books might stay on the shelves for years. Now, armed with a pile of fan letters and strong sales of the Tarzan issue of All-Story magazine, he pitched Tarzan of the Apes to book publishers.

They weren’t interested. Every publisher Burroughs contacted turned him down, so he put the idea aside and signed up with a newspaper syndicator to publish his stories in newspaper serial form instead. It was a huge success- and convinced A.C. McClurg and Co., one of the publishers that had originally turned Burroughs down, to publish Tarzan of the Apes after all.

In the years to come, that very first Tarzan novel would sell more than three million copies, earning a fortune for both Edgar Rice Burroughs and his publisher. But it was only the beginning: In his lifetime, Burroughs would write 66 more novels, 26 of them Tarzan novels; and by the time he died in 1950, he’d sold more than 36 million books in 31 different languages all over the world.  This made him the most successful author of the first half of the 20th century.

JACK OF ALL TRADES

Burroughs was mores than just the most successful writer of his age: He was a pioneer in the art of marketing a character in every possible medium. After succeeding in magazines, newspapers, hardcover books (paperbacks had not been invented yet), and movies, in 1932 Burroughs formed a radio division of his corporation. He created a 364-episode “Tarzan” radio serial that was sold to radio stations all over the country. (Burroughs’s son-in-law, Jack Pierce -who played Tarzan in the 1926 film Tarzan and the Golden Lion- and his daughter Joan Burroughs Pierce, provided the voices of Tarzan and Jane.)

In creating the “Tarzan” radio show, Burroughs actually “introduced the pre-recorded radio show,” Essoe writes. “Up to this time, all radio programs had been aired live. Tarzan’s pioneering success in this field prompted a major trend toward ‘canned’ broadcasts.”

The following year, Burroughs signed a deal with United Features Syndicate to create and distribute a “Tarzan” comic strip to newspapers. At its peak in 1942, the strip appeared in 141 daily papers and 156 Sunday papers all over the world. Then in 1936, Burroughs took those same newspaper strips and relaunched them as comic books.

PUT A TARZAN IN YOUR TANK

Meanwhile, as Tarzan conquered one mass medium after another, Burroughs was busy licensing his hero’s name and image to several hundred different manufacturers. They flooded the nations with hundreds of Tarzan products, including sweatshirts, wristwatches, masks and “chest wigs,” candy, peanuts, bubblegum, trading cards, rubber toys, leg garters, bathing suits; and even Tarzan brand coffee, bread, and gasoline. In Japan, Tarzan fitness magazine told people how to stay in shape just like Tarzan.

In 1939, Burroughs even founded the Tarzan Clan of America, which he hoped would one day rival the Boy Scouts. (It didn’t.)

Perhaps the most interesting use of the Tarzan name was in 1928, when Burroughs subdivided the Southern california ranch estate he’d nought nine years earlier and began selling off parcels. On July 9, 1928, the U.S. Postal Service granted the former ranch its own post office and official recognition as a town, giving it the same name Burroughs had bestowed upon it when he bought the property in 1919: Tarzana.

KING OF THE JUNGLE

Before Edgar Rice Burroughs came along, no one had ever tried to market a fictional character this way. For that matter, in creating so many different competing forms of the same character, Burroughs had done precisely the opposite of what the brightest business and marketing minds of his day would have recommended. Not just the inventor of one of the most enduring fictional characters of the 20th century, he was also the inventor of an entirely new way of doing business, John Taliaferro write in Tarzan Forever:

Though marketing experts ands syndication agents warned that Tarzan on the radio would compete with Tarzan in the comics or that serial motion pictures would steal audiences from feature motion pictures, Burroughs was convinced that the total would exceed the sum of its parts. As he saw it, there was no such thing as overkill, and well before Walt Disney ever hawked his first mouse ears or Ninja Turtle “action figures” became film stars, Burroughs was already a grand master of a concept that would one day be known as multimedia…

In short order, Tarzan became a superhero, the first pop icon to attain global saturation. As such he was the forefather of  Superman and more recent real-life marvels such as Michael Jordan. Before Tarzan, nobody understood just how big, how ubiquitous, how marketable a star could be.

Of course, without the successful series of films, Tarzan might never have become the mighty pop force he still is today. The story of Tarzan in the movies is coming soon.  

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's All-Purpose Extra Strength Bathroom Reader.

The 13th book in the series by the Bathroom Reader's Institute has 504 pages crammed with fun facts, including articles on the biggest movie bombs ever, the origin and unintended use of I.Q. test, and more.

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