Edgar Rice Burroughs has undergone something of a revision since the dawn of the 21st century. Once relegated to the lower depth of pulp fiction writers composing stories more on the basis of being paid-per-word than creative stimulation, his greatest and most lasting legacy had much in common with reputation: primal, draped in rags rather than quality haberdashery and, though certainly noble in his own way, also essentially savage and not fit for polite society. The revisionism has not quite made Burroughs suitable for a much-belated Nobel Prize or anything, but he is at least now viewed more widely and sincerely as a gift writer of action prose. No less a representative of the kind of author generally viewed as everything that Burroughs was not than Gore Vidal noted the quality of this talent by reminding readers in an essay published in Esquire that making action come to life using only prose is “as difficult for a Tolstoy as” for a writer of pulp fiction like Burroughs.
Tarzan of the Apes is never going to be confused with the works of Edith Wharton or Theodore Dreiser, to name just two authors writing during the same era as Burroughs. Neither of those writers need to have their reputation revised and they are representative of the types of novelists whose books competed for shelf space with the Tarzan series. Between the publication of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country in 1913 and the 1925 appearance of An American Tragedy by Dreiser, Tarzan went from being a character in a shortly story written by an unknown writer to one of the first bona fide pop culture sensations. Each story which followed upon Tarzan of the Apes was a bestseller and Tarzan became a hit movie character even before sound allowed his famous yell to be heard. Broadway audiences experienced no such lack when a play based upon the character hit the Great White Way in 1921.
And then there was 1923. That is the year that truly marks the lasting significance of Tarzan of the Apes. For without that first successful appearance in novel-length form, perhaps the King of the Jungle might not have been quite the pop culture sensation he still remains a century after his origin. The Tarzan craze had reached such a height by 1923 that he had made Edgar Rice Burroughs one of the most financially successful writers in the world, far outstripping future Pulitzer and Nobel laureates. So successful, in fact, that a lawyer convinced him to do something that was almost unheard-of at the time, but has become part of the business of writing books today. When Burroughs took the step of incorporating himself in a dual effort to gain more control over his creations and whittle down his tax burden, he rushed past more serious and respected writers like Wharton and Dreiser (and Fitzgerald and Faulkner) to become the very model of the modern day man of letters. The success which started with the almost overnight fame and wealth following the publication of Tarzan of the Apes made Burroughs the very first Writer-as-Media-Mogul. Long before writers like Stephen King, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling blurred the line between creating characters and producing commodities, Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Superman-in-a-loincloth were transforming the entire publishing paradigm.
Let the revision of the creative side of Burroughs and his Tarzan novels continue unabated; he was never the hack he was made out to be. If he wins that Nobel Prize posthumously one day, so be it. In the meantime, however, Burroughs is at least deserving of recognition for rising above his more illustrious peers like Steinbeck and Welty to become the image upon which future writers would try to base their careers. The key, of course, being that Tarzan of the Apes is an essential work not on the basis of any actual content, but as a template for branding a character as commodity.
