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The guide to modern life for which one has been waiting:  Coolness Graphed.

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As we navigate our lives with increased confidence, we might send adventurous birthday greetings to Edgar Rice Burroughs; he as born on this date in 1875.  In 1911, after a series of unsuccessful jobs (cavalry ranger, cowboy, clerk), Burroughs was working as a pencil sharpener wholesaler.  The story goes that…

Burroughs was sitting in his rented office and waiting for his crack pencil sharpener salesmen to report in, their pockets bulging with orders. Besides waiting, one of Burroughs’ duties was to verify the placement of advertisements for his sharpeners in various magazines. These were all-fiction “pulp” magazines, a prime source of escapist reading material for the rapidly expanding middle class. Verifying the pencil sharpener ads didn’t exactly take much time. The pencil sharpener salesmen never showed up, so Burroughs spent his idle time reading those pulp magazines. And an idea was born.

After reading several thousand words of breathless pulp fiction Burroughs determined ~ or so he claimed ~ that “if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines”…

Burroughs wrote a novel, Under the Moons of Mars, which was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1912 (and introduced “John Carter”).  Tarzan of the Apes came later that year.  Burroughs served as one of the oldest war correspondents in the field during World War II, and died in 1950, having published almost 70 novels.

In 1915 (or 1919, records disagree), Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named “Tarzana.”  The citizens of the community that sprang up around the ranch voted to adopt that name when they incorporated their enclave– and Tarzana, California was formed in 1927.

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