September 2024

"I could write stories just as rotten"

In 1911, a 36-year-old former rancher, miner, and battery factory worker with a lot of spare time on his hands began reading pulp-fiction magazines. He later recalled, "If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of these magazines, then 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."

A year later, "Tarzan of the Apes" was published, and the guy who thought he could out-rotten other writers proved he could also out-sell them -- by a lot. Edgar Rice Burroughs went on to write 25 more Tarzan books -- plus four other series, all science fiction.

But it was Tarzan who dominated Burroughs's thinking. Tarzan was immediately popular, and Burroughs capitalized on it in every possible way, including a syndicated Tarzan comic strip, 27 films, and merchandise. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon. Burroughs's California ranch is now the center of the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles.

For those unfamiliar with the Tarzan story, Tarzan is an orphaned white child raised by apes in the African jungle. Burroughs strongly supported eughenics and scientific racism, so Tarzan, though uneducated, constantly demonstrated superiority to black Africans, whom Burroughs presented as inherently inferior and even wholly human. Burroughs's work is peppered with such attitudes.

Nonetheless, his contributions to the genre are demonstrable. Ray Bradbury said of him, "Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out -- and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly -- Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world. By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special." And to try to imitate that Tarzan yell!

Source: Wikipedia

This month's Puzzler

On August 22, 1920, this man was born in Waukegan, Illinois. Raised in a blue-collar family, he was an intellectually curious child who preferred reading to playground games with friends. When he began elementary school, he was drawn to science fiction and fantasy tales featuring heroic figures like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Within a few years, he moved on to masters of the genre—including H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allen Poe. By age eleven, he began writing his own short stories, and at age twelve, he embarked on his first serious writing effort, an attempt to write a sequel to an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.

At age fourteen, he and his family moved to California. While attending Los Angeles High School, he became a huge movie fan, but also deepened and expanded his sci-fi interests. He graduated from high school in 1938.

After publishing his first story in 1938—at age 18—he spent nearly a decade trying to make it as a writer (severe vision problems kept him out of military service in WWII). While some stories were published in pulp fiction magazines (“the pulps”), he had no success in getting into “the glossies.”

In 1946, he entered a short story (“Homecoming”) in a Mademoiselle magazine competition. The story was about a young boy who, lacking supernatural powers himself, felt like a complete outsider at a family reunion of witches, vampires, and werewolves. The tale resonated with a young staffer named Truman Capote, who plucked it from a slush pile of submissions. After it was published, it went on to become one of the year’s best American short stories.

Over the next several decades, he became one of literary history’s most popular and influential writers. (We'd mention some of his books, but that would make it too easy!)

Who was this man? (Answer below)

Word of the day: Vellichor

n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
From vellum, parchment + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Ancient Greek mythology. Pronounced “vel-uh-kawr.”

John Koenig, creator of "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows," coined the term.

Puzzler answer

Ray Bradbury. If you like our Puzzler, find more on our Facebook page.

Thanks to Dr. Mardy Grothe for the use of his puzzler. Visit him at drmardy.com.

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