away from the academy, but he then begins playing football, his studies improve, and he writes for the school newspaper.

1894 Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is published.

1895 Burroughs graduates from the Michigan Military Academy, then tries but fails to secure a place at West Point. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is published.

1896 The adventurous young man joins the U.S. Army and travels to the Arizona Territory with hopes of battling Apaches, but illness and boredom sour the experience. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau is published.

1897 Discharged from the army, Burroughs returns to Chicago and works for his father at the American Battery Company. He begins courting his childhood sweetheart, Emma Centennia Hulbert. An interest in drawing leads him to enroll for a short time in the Chicago Art Institute. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1898 Burroughs leaves for Idaho to help his brothers on the family ranch. He opens a stationery shop in Pocatello, intending to import magazines and periodicals to the Wild West, but business is bad. Burroughs has a few poems published in the local newspaper. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is published.

1899 After an unsuccessful trip to New York to try to secure another army post, Burroughs again works at the American Battery Company.

1900 Edgar and Emma marry in Chicago. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is published.

1903 Burroughs leaves American Battery and takes Emma to Idaho to prospect for gold. Still interested in drawing, he also writes his first fiction, Minidoka, which he subtitles An Historical Fairy Tale. Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild.

1904 The gold venture fails, and Burroughs struggles to make a living, working for the next few years at several jobs—among them railroad police officer, construction worker, door-to-door salesman, and candy vendor.

1906 Still struggling to make ends meet, Burroughs attempts unsuccessfully to enlist in the Chinese army.

1907 He takes a managerial job in the correspondence department at Sears, Roebuck.

1908 A daughter, Joan, is born. Although he makes a decent living at Sears, a yearning for independence leads him to start his own advertising company, but it fails. Edgar and Emma pawn some possessions to make ends meet.

1909 Burroughs begins hawking a supposed tonic for alcoholism, but authorities shut down the business. A son, Hulbert, is born.

1911 After reading some pulp-fiction magazines, Burroughs writes his own story, “Under the Moons of Mars,” for which the magazine The All-Story pays him the impressive sum of $400. He begins writing Tarzan of the Apes.

1912 All-Story accepts Tarzan of the Apes, paying Burroughs $700 for the novel, which it publishes in its entirety. Reader response is enthusiastic, and the magazine is flooded with requests for more Tarzan installments. Conan Doyle’s science-fiction novel The Lost World is published.

1913 A son, John, is born. All-Story serializes The Gods of Mars. New Story serializes The Return of Tarzan; N. C. Wyeth paints the cover art for the third installment.

1914 Tarzan of the Apes is released in book form. Burroughs writes many stories during the next few years. World War I begins.

1915 Burroughs attempts to sell a number of works to Hollywood film companies. Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is published.

1916 Burroughs details a three-month family camping trip in the diary Auto-Gypsying. The family spends the winter in Los Angeles while he negotiates with film producers and tries to secure a commission to fight in World War I; he ultimately joins the reserves.

1918 Two films based on Burroughs’s works, Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan, debut to great success, but Burroughs is frustrated by the simplistic way Hollywood depicts Tarzan. In addition to his fiction, Burroughs publishes patriotic articles.

1919 He moves his family to California, where he buys a large ranch he names Tarzana.

1920 Besides running the ranch and subdividing the land, Burroughs is busy with his writing; he will publish twenty-four Tarzan novels during his career, in addition to countless stories and articles.

1923 Burroughs forms his own company, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., to handle increasing demands for Tarzan-related material and merchandise.

1924 He publishes The Land That Time Forgot, a novel in which dinosaurs and winged humanoids, along with other primitive species and modern humans, live on an island in the South Pacific.

1925 Tarzan of the Apes is now published in at least seventeen languages. The family celebrates Burroughs’s fiftieth birthday by taking a camping trip to the Grand Canyon.

1929 The first daily comic strip featuring Tarzan appears.

1930 Following many years of work to create a town out of the community that has grown up