Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Pulps

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Edgar Rice Burroughs flourished during the age of the weekly magazines, All-Story Weekly, Argosy, Blue Book and Red Book. These weekly publications were also general magazines, meaning a Western might appear beside a sea story, beside a Science Fiction tale, beside a Romance and so on. Edgar Rice Burroughs popularized SF in their pages because he was the first to truly marry gadgets and space stuff to a tale of romance, hooking both male and female readers.

For decades Burroughs was one of the top paid writers (along with Zane Grey), establishing a style of fantastic adventure that would be copied by others like Otis Adelbert Kline, Howard Browne and a host of others. Magazines that could not get Burroughs would publish pseudo-Burroughs. And then in the 1930s the Magazine Era became the Pulp era.

This change for Burroughs was hardly catastrophic. His royalties on Tarzan films alone would have kept food on the table. Not to mention radio shows, comic books, hard cover versions of his collected works published by his own company. No, ERB could have walked away from magazines a long time before the weekly disappeared. His financial problems by 1941 were of world proportions. His foreign royalties had stopped because of the war in Europe. Living in Hawaii, for economy (yes, back then Hawaii was not a state and people fled there to escape US tax and other problems) with his new, young wife, Florence, he banged out work eight hours a day just like any working stiff. These stories were a little different than in the old days. With the Weeklies gone, Burroughs had to write for the Pulps. And it was a new game. Instead of the novels of yesteryear he wrote 20,000 word novellas he would later stick together with a few new chapters to make books.

This wasn’t the first time he had appeared in a Pulp though. In 1927, he had sold The Mastermind of Mars to Hugo Gernsback for the Amazing Annual 1927. This one-time sale did not draw him away from the Weeklies (not at $1250 which Hugo was, of course, slow to pay. There was a reason why H. P. Lovecraft and his friends called him “Hugo the Rat”), but when those markets had dried up by 1940, he decided to write Tarzan novellas for the slicks. The first try, “Tarzan and the Jungle Murders” (largely revised by an editor) appeared in the Pulp, Thrilling Adventures. Turning instead to his other creations, Burroughs approached the magazine that he had sold to in 1927. Hugo Gernsback was long gone but the new editor, Ray A. Palmer, agreed to a deal where Burroughs would write 20,000 worders about Barsoom, Venus and Pellucidar. These would be the last finished works of his writing career…

The novellas might have been poor stuff but instead they seemed to spark something Burroughs had been missing for awhile. If Tarzan the Magnificent and The Land of Terror are any indication, Burroughs was written out. The excitement was gone and the writing was pure potboiler, or worse. But with the shorter novellas, ERB had a chance to try new, shorter ideas, which along with their wonderful J. Allen St John covers thrilled Pulp readers, pleasing both Burroughs and Palmer. Just as the short stories that made up Jungle Tales of Tarzan saved the franchise back in 1916, Burroughs’ last flicker, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor (which he watched from the Nioumla Hotel in Honolulu) came in the short form. ERB would sign up as war correspondent, effectively bringing this small renaissance to an end. With the exception of Tarzan and the Foreign Legion (which no publisher would touch, even in wartime, so Burroughs published it himself), any remaining Burroughs work would appear after his death.

1. Mastermind of Mars (July 1927) Amazing Stories Annual, 1927