Edgar Rice Burroughs had a tamer life than Grey—then again who didn’t?—but wrote racier stuff. Three years younger than Grey, Burroughs was born in 1875 into a well-off family in Chicago, but he was something of a black sheep and struggled to find a role for himself in life. He went west as a young man and tried storekeeping, ranching, panning for gold, and working as a railroad policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-five, he produced his first hit, Tarzan of the Apes.
