[3] Burroughs was an explicit supporter of eugenics and scientific racism in both his fiction and nonfiction; Tarzan was meant to reflect these concepts.

[4][5][6] Burroughs was of English and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, with a family line that had been in North America since the Colonial era.

Some of his ancestors settled in Virginia during the colonial period, and Burroughs often emphasized his connection with that side of his family, seeing it as romantic and warlike.

He graduated in 1895, but he failed the entrance exam for the United States Military Academy at West Point, so instead he enlisted with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in Fort Grant, Arizona Territory.

During the Chicago influenza epidemic of 1891, he spent half a year at his brother's ranch on the Raft River in Idaho as a cowboy.

[citation needed] In 1903, Burroughs joined his brothers, Yale graduates George and Harry, who were, by then, prominent Pocatello area ranchers in southern Idaho, and partners in the Sweetser-Burroughs Mining Company, where he took on managing their ill-fated Snake River gold dredge, a classic bucket-line dredge.

The Burroughs brothers were also the sixth cousins, once removed, of famed miner Kate Rice who, in 1914, became the first female prospector in the Canadian North.

[11] When the new mine proved unsuccessful, the brothers secured for Burroughs a position with the Oregon Short Line Railroad in Salt Lake City.

[21] After the war ended, Burroughs moved back to Encino, California, where after many health problems, he died of a heart attack on March 19, 1950, having written almost 80 novels.

[24][25] Aiming his work at the pulps—under the name "Norman Bean" to protect his reputation—Burroughs had his first story, Under the Moons of Mars, serialized by Frank Munsey in the February to July 1912 issues of The All-Story.

[26][27][28][b] Under the Moons of Mars inaugurated the Barsoom series, introduced John Carter, and earned Burroughs US$400 ($11,922 today).

[26] Burroughs soon took up writing full-time, and by the time the run of Under the Moons of Mars had finished, he had completed two novels, including Tarzan of the Apes, published from October 1912 and one of his most successful series.

[citation needed] In either 1915 or 1919, Burroughs purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles, California, which he named "Tarzana".

"[34] By 1963, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction wrote when discussing reprints of several Burroughs novels by Ace Books, "an entire generation has grown up inexplicably Burroughs-less".

He stated that most of the author's books had been out of print for years and that only the "occasional laughable Tarzan film" reminded the public of his fiction.

They express eugenicist views themselves, but Tarzan is permitted to live despite being deemed "unfit" in comparison and grows up to surpass not only them but black Africans, whom Burroughs clearly presents as inherently inferior.

Lost on Venus, a later novel, presents a similar utopia where forced sterilization is practiced and the "unfit" are killed.

Additionally, his Pirate Blood, which is not speculative fiction and remained unpublished after his death, portrayed the characters as victims of their hereditary criminal traits (one a descendant of the corsair Jean Lafitte, another from the Jukes family).