Burroughs, Edgar Rice

(US, 1875–1950)

Born in Chicago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was educated at a military academy. He is best known as the creator of Tarzan, the English aristocrat raised by apes and subsequently discovered by explorers in Africa. Tarzan of the Apes (1912) was the first of over a dozen Tarzan adventures, and others in the series include The Son of Tarzan (1917) and Tarzan Triumphant (1932). Now better known through television and film adaptations, Burroughs's Tarzan books were immediate best-sellers, despite the fact that Burroughs himself is known never to have set foot in Africa. A series of novels set on Mars, including The Princess of Mars (1917), were less immediately successful, though they retain a following among science-fiction readers. Burroughs later became a journalist based in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Henry Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells  WB