Edgar Rice Burroughs

Burroughs failed at everything for twenty years. Military school, then the Seventh Cavalry in Arizona until a heart murmur got him discharged; then gold dredging, a railroad policeman's beat, door-to-door sales, and finally the wholesale of pencil sharpeners, which he could not sell either. He was thirty-five, in a slow office, reading the pulp magazines that came across his desk, when he decided the stories were bad enough that he could do better.

He was right within a year. A Martian romance sold in 1912; Tarzan of the Apes appeared in the same year and became one of the most widely franchised characters of the century. He wrote around eighty novels, and — unusually for a pulp writer — understood exactly what he had. He incorporated himself to keep control of his own rights, bought a ranch, named it Tarzana, and watched the town that grew there take the name.

The books carry the racial assumptions of their moment without embarrassment, and the depiction of Africans in the Tarzan novels is part of what those books are. At sixty-six he was in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was attacked and became the oldest American war correspondent of the conflict.