Literary Birthday – 1 September – Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on 1 September 1875 and died on 19 March 1950.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Quotes

1. I have often been asked how I came to write. The best answer is that I needed the money. When I started I was 35 and had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted.
2. That I had to work is evidenced by a graph that I keep on my desk showing my word output from year to year since 1911. In 1913, it reached its peak, with 413,000 words for the year.
3. I write to escape; to escape poverty.
4. With the success of my first story, l decided to make writing a career, though I was canny enough not to give up my job. But the job did not pay expenses and we had a recurrence of great poverty, sustained only by the thread of hope that I might make a living writing fiction. I cast about for a better job and landed one as a department manager for a business magazine. While I was working there, I wrote Tarzan of the Apes, evenings and holidays. I wrote it in longhand on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper. I did not think it was a very good story and I doubted if it would sell. But Bob Davis saw its possibilities for magazine publication and I got a check … this time, l think, for $700.
5. The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.
6. Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.
7. I presume that it is the better part of wisdom that we bow to our fate with as good grace as possible.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer of speculative fiction. He was best known for writing Tarzan of the Apes, The Land That Time Forgot, and A Princess of Mars. His Tarzan stories created a folk hero known around the world. The stories were translated into more than 56 languages and were also popular in comic-strip, motion-picture, television, and radio versions.

Source for Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BurroughsEdgarRice.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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