1 September: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Today's birthday - in 1875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, US writer, creator of Tarzan was born on this date. He is also known for the hollow Earth-themed Pellucidar series, beginning with At the Earth's Core, and the lost world-themed Caspak trilogy, beginning with The Land that Time Forgot.

1. On both sides of his family he was descended from early settlers to the US. One of them was Deacon Edmund Rice, a Puritan who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century.
2. As a young man he’d tried to get into the military academy at West Point but failed the exam. He joined the army but was discharged when he was found to have a heart problem. He drifted somewhat after that, working at various jobs including as a cowboy and in a battery factory. A mining venture with his brothers was unsuccessful.
3. It was while he was working as a pencil sharpener salesman and reading pulp science fiction in his spare time that he decided to try writing. His approach was quite cynical. “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.”
4. His first story was Under the Moons of Mars which he sold to a magazine as a serial. They paid him $400 for it, which would be $9,000 in today’s money. He used a pen name, Norman Bean, to protect his own reputation.
5. He wrote nearly 80 books, 26 of which were about Tarzan. He’d write up to 12 pages a day and kept records of how much he’d written. (413,000 words in 1913).
6. He married Emma Hulbert, his childhood sweetheart, in 1900. They had three children. His daughter Joan married an actor from the Tarzan films, James Pierce, and herself was the voice of Jane in radio adaptations. One of his sons, John Coleman, illustrated his books. Burroughs divorced Emma in 1934 and the following year married a former actress and ex-wife of a friend, Florence Gilbert Dearholt. He adopted her two children. They divorced in 1942.
7. He bought a ranch in California, just north of Los Angeles, which he called “Tarzana”. A community sprang up around the ranch which would later become a district of Los Angeles. The residents voted to keep the name Tarzana.
8. In his later years, he moved to Hawaii. One day he heard what he thought was a bombing exercise but turned out to be the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He then became a war reporter, the oldest war correspondent in America at the time, at the age of 66.
9. He moved back to California, and died there of a heart attack in 1950 aged 74.
10. There is a crater on Mars named after him, since many of the boys who read his stories were inspired to explore space for real.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book