Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 - March 19, 1950) has obtained lasting fame for his works about the jungle hero Tarzan, and also for the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, but he was a voluminous writer who also wrote in many other genres as well. Burroughs famously got started out of disdain for others' writings, noting 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.