Burroughs in his late sixties during World War II, serving as the oldest war correspondent in the U.S. Army.

“Entertainment is fiction’s purpose.” —Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1930

The other day, in celebration of his one hundred and fiftieth birthday, I penned a post about the early life of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Due to late-breaking news, I have now added to it substantially. You can find it here.

I always intended to write this post as an addendum to the first. Most SFF fans know the highlights of Burroughs' literary career: John Carter of Mars, Tarzan and Carson of Venus. While enough to ensure literary immortality along with the likes of Dumas and Doyle, there is far, far more out there.

When I 'came back' to ERB about fifteen years ago--after over twenty years of considering him a 'guilty pleasure'--one thing I did was reread my Burroughs collection that had miraculously survived the Flood of 2012. Many of those were the original books I bought back in the '70s when I first became an ERB fan. Many/most of them were reprints from the ‘Burroughs Boom’ launched by Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books a decade earlier.

Reading those old, cool paperbacks, I realized that there was about a twelve-year period when Burroughs was unleashed and truly hitting on all cylinders. This was a man whose incandescent imagination had basically been quashed for thirty-five years—and was then suddenly given affirmation and financial incentives to put the pedal to the metal. What resulted was a flood of notable novels, many of whom now languish in relative obscurity. There were also quality works written toward the end of his literary career, when he no longer cared about supporting his (now grown) children or pleasing critics. I'll look at a selected list of those novels in this essay.

The first novel ERB wrote after 'Under the Moons of Mars'/A Princess of Mars--in 1911--was a historical novel, The Outlaw of Torn. Set during the reign of King Henry III, I bounced off it back when I first read it during the '80s. I think I might have a different opinion now. There are certainly several people whom I respect that love it. It also appears to have inspired the title, somehow, of Metallica's song, "The Outlaw Torn".

Burroughs wrote At the Earth's Core in 1913. Set in the 'Hollow Earth' world of Pellucidar, this one is a banger. Ed supposes a world ruled by intelligent reptiles with hypnotic/telepathic powers, whose dominion is enforced by genetically-engineered ape-men. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard both--very likely--took notes from this seminal novel.

Also in 1913, ERB unleashed The Monster Men, a mash-up of Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau. The protagonist is 'Number Thirteen', also known as 'Bulan'. Seemingly the result of science gone wrong, Bulan attempts to give his soulless existence meaning by rescuing the daughter of the scientist who gave him life. He drives his fellow miscreants mercilessly, all the while fighting head-hunters and pirates. Here we can see the 'Uruk-hai born from vats' ninety years before Petey Jackson put them on the screen. While Burroughs left some deep subtexts of the plot only half-examined, I still recall the novel’s sheer imagination and relentless drive with great fondness.

To finish off 1913, Burroughs wrote The Mucker. Billy Byrne is a blue-eyed, black-haired, Irish-American bad-ass. Growing up on the wrong side of Chicago--ERB’s birthplace—Byrne is a dangerous man, with a taste for crime and whiskey. I have called The Mucker one of the great pulp novels. I stand by it. Byrne goes from inner-city violence to high seas mayhem to lost-race insanity in less than two hundred pages.

This cram-it-all-in theme, along with the ethnicity and phenotype of Byrne, sure sounds like a prototype for Conan the Cimmerian--and the 'juvenile' version of Francis X. Gordon. Whaddaya know? Robert E. Howard owned the 1921 edition of The Mucker. I was saying such things on The Official REH Forum from 2006-on. Steve Trout beat me to it, blog-essay-wise, in 2009, writing for the Cimmerian blog. On top of everything else, that novel inspired one of the greatest Frazetta ERB covers ever.

In 1919, Burroughs wrote 'Under the Red Flag'. It was a post-apocalyptic tale about a Communist take-over of the United States. ERB wrote it just as the Bolshevik shadow fell across what had been the Russian Empire. All the mass graves, all the gulags, the Holodomor and Walter Duranty's cover-ups were mostly in the future. If Burroughs' story can be faulted, it is that he imagined a more just and civilized Communism in the U.S.

ERB's usual markets refused to publish the story 'as is'. Imagine that? These were the same New York publishers who ignored all the warning signs coming out of the nascent USSR and then gave a Pulitzer to Walter Duranty.

To make it all more palatable, Ed would write The Moon Maid, a sword-and-planet 'prequel' to the original tale. The Moon Maid was a novel that still contained an anti-Communist subtext, but also displayed ERB's innate talent to depict cosmic awe and wonder. The text of The Moon Maid also inspired ‘Mars Day’, which is intermittently celebrated here on the DMR blog. After writing The Moon Maid, Burroughs went back and slightly modified ‘Under the Red Flag’ to suit the established framework, renaming it ‘The Moon Men’.

Burroughs wrote 'The Red Hawk' as the final tale in the 'Moon Sequence/Trilogy' in 1925. All the threads from the first two 'Moon' tales are wrapped up within it. Even separating it from the other two parts, 'The Red Hawk" is one of the great, early American SF post-apocalyptic adventure tales. Robert Adams would draw upon it for his 'Horseclans' series in the 1980s. ‘The Moon Men’ and ‘The Red Hawk’ were combined into one collection for the first time by Don Wollheim in 1963 and titled The Moon Men.

In 1926, ERB wrote The War Chief. In 1927, he wrote Apache Devil. The two books formed a duology centered upon Shoz-Dijiji, a Chiricahua Apache and a youthful follower of Geronimo. Burroughs based his utterly savage 'Green Men of Barsoom' upon his--limited--contacts with the Apache. Despite no real pressure, he set out to make things more accurate and right, twenty years later. The two novels are still brutal and bloody, but they depict the Apaches as a warrior culture worthy of respect. These were the novels that inspired Patrick Dearen, an award-winning author of Western fiction.

In 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the novelette, 'Pirate Blood'. For anyone who thinks that ERB “couldn't write hard-boiled fiction”, this tale refutes that. The story involves a cast of characters--all of whom are out for themselves—who go through various adventures. The ending is not ‘romantic’.

ERB wrote I Am a Barbarian in 1941. At this point he was gut-sick of Germans. As a patriotic American, Ed had demonized them during World War One and afterward...and then—due to his innate sense of fairness—backtracked with novels like Tarzan at the Earth's Core and Back to the Stone Age. Then World War II erupted.

The early chapters of the novel bad-mouth barbaric Germanics and decadent Italians--a fairly obvious swipe at the NSDAP and Mussolini's Fascists. The protagonist of the novel is a blonde Celt who ends up as the boyhood servant of Caligula. I think many REH fans will be surprised by how much the views of Howard and ERB sync up.

Well, there ya go. I could've listed at least ten more novels, but these should provide a sufficient rabbit-hole to follow. At all times, remember: Ed considered entertaining his readers as being paramount. It was his primary goal. Any 'message' was secondary—-but almost always there. An ethic worthy of contemplation, coming from one of the most successful and influential authors the world has ever seen.

As always, the official Edgar Rice Burroughs website is here. Also, the best ERB site on the entire Interwebz is here. The DMR Books blog has a rich ERB ‘library’ of posts that can be accessed here. Also, a recent post about Michael Kaluta’s ERB art can be found here.