Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, the world's best-known apeman, first swung into view in the pages of a pulp fiction magazine in 1912. The Lord of the Jungle went on to conquer the media, including books, movies, comic strips, radio, comic books, and television. Burroughs was in his middle thirties and had failed in several professions—including being an instructor at a military academy, running a stationery store, and working as a salesman of pencil sharpeners—when he turned to the writing of pulp fiction in the second decade of the twentieth century. His first published work was a serial titled Under the Moons of Mars. It introduced his science fiction hero John Carter and started in the February 1912 issue of All-Story magazine. Later that same year, borrowing from the works of such writers as H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, Burroughs invented his major character. His novel Tarzan of...