Topping suggests that one manner by which Americans attempted to compensate for this loss of frontier was to re-create it in popular fiction, and he identifies Tarzan as a prime example. The American Adam was dead, the Garden of Eden subdivided. The option of escaping into the wilderness, such as was available to James FenimoreĬooper's fictional character Natty Bumppo and Mark Twain's Huck Finn, was lost to history. Without the frontier, America was still a man's world, but it was a world that entrapped and emasculated the man. Turner asserted that the wilderness had fashioned those who lived among it into an American prototype-hardy, independent, resourceful, self-reliant, democratic. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) wrote his influential essay 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History.' Turner's essay centered on data from the 1890 census that suggested that the American frontier no longer existed.

As Roderick Nash and Gary Topping have noted, books such as Tarzan became popular at a particular time in U.S. Readers living in an increasingly dehumanizing and regimented world could live vicariously through this English lord who solved problems instantly with muscles and a knife. Fan letters poured in, and Tarzan was published in book form in June 1914.Įscape was a prime ingredient of Tarzan's appeal. In October 1912 'Tarzan of the Apes' appeared in All-Story. While checking ads for pencil sharpeners that he had placed in pulp magazines, Burroughs began reading the fiction published there and decided that he could write just as badly and more entertainingly.

He then failed as a storekeeper worked in his father's battery company served as a railroad policeman dredged for gold in Idaho and sold lightbulbs, patent medicines, and salesmanship courses. Burroughs had graduated from Michigan Military Academy, had failed entrance examinations to West Point, was discharged from the army due to a heart murmur, and was rejected as a volunteer for Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War.

At that time Burroughs was an inexperienced fiction writer struggling to support his wife and two small children.

When Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) submitted the story 'Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle' to the pulp magazine All-Story in 1912, he was desperately lacking money and confidence.

Tarzan 1912