Born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 1, 1875, into a well-to-do family, Edgar Rice Burroughs was given an aristocratic private education. But though he tried his hand at several business ventures, he was drawn more to an itinerant life of adventure than to a life in the boardroom.

In 1912, after many failed business ventures, the thirty-five-year-old Burroughs published his first story, “Under the Moons of Mars,” in the pulp magazine All-Story. It was so successful that he turned soon thereafter to writing full-time. He would write nearly 70 novels and numerous short stories before his death in 1950. Although best-known for his immensely popular Tarzan series—he later bought an estate near where the films were shot in Southern California that he named Tarzana—Burroughs didn’t confine himself to a single genre, also writing medieval romances, westerns, and mainstream novels.Among his many science-fiction works, Burroughs wrote eleven novels in the John Carter of Mars series, the titular final installment of which was published fourteen years after his death in 1950.