{"id":1031,"date":"2019-07-17T16:16:15","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T22:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2020-07-16T09:31:51","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T15:31:51","slug":"the-eight-year-novel-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/the-eight-year-novel-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eight-year Novel, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Ed Burroughs was really pissed off. <\/strong><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Having just seen the color proofs for the dust-jacket of his new book from A.C. McClurg, Ed took to his typewriter to tell his editor, Joseph Bray, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thought about it. Among other things, he said this: \u201c\u2026 There is nothing of the atmosphere or coloring of Arizona in the foliage or background; in fact the whole thing is atrocious and if the picture can kill sales, I am confident that this one will.\u201d<\/em> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

In the fall of 1919 ERB toyed with the idea of writing a story about Apaches. He wrote to The American Boy<\/em> magazine that he would like to write juveniles and he was thinking of \u201cwriting a series of stories about an Apache Indian boy during a period before the Indian country had been encroached upon by whites.\u201d He said, \u201cI think I could make the boy almost as interesting as Tarzan, because I have lived for a while among the Apaches\u2026\u201d<\/p>\r\n

A month later he tried to pitch the idea to Robert H. Davis, his editor at Munsey Magazines. He thought he could \u201cmake another character similar to Tarzan using a young Apache warrior.\u201d He went on to describe the Native Americans as the \u201che-race of the Western Hemisphere\u201d and eulogized them as, in essence, supermen. \u201cThere never was a more warlike people. They fought every human from Kansas to Mexico; they could travel on foot all day with mounted men and be fresh at night; their senses were as acute as those of wild beasts; physically they were perfect and many of them were handsome even by our standards\u2026\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Tarzan was selling like hotcakes that year with the latest, Jungle Tales of Tarzan,<\/em><\/strong> in its fourth printing for a total of 63,000 copies. He was trying to sell his dystopian anti-communist novel, to later become the second part of The Moon Maid,<\/strong><\/em> and was just finishing a third short modern novel, The Efficiency Expert.<\/strong><\/em> However, Davis wasn\u2019t keen on the \u201cApache Tarzan\u201d idea and nothing more was said about it. Ed put his notes aside, and over the next couple of years came out with two more Tarzan\u2019s, a Mars story and one about the evils of Hollywood and dope.<\/p>\r\n

He might have never returned to the \u201cApache Tarzan\u201d idea if his British publisher, Sir Algernon Methuen, hadn\u2019t suggested, four years later, in October, 1923, that he try a \u201cwild west\u201d story since he had experiences in chasing the Apache Kid in Arizona, gold mining in Idaho and working as a cowboy on his brothers\u2019 ranch when he was sixteen. Ed wasn\u2019t so sure about it, making an excuse that his readers really wanted his \u201cmore imaginative stuff,\u201d and the British would probably want a “motion-picture cowboy.” He didn\u2019t think there\u2019d be a market for it in the States, brushing off the fact that his book publisher, A.C. McClurg & Co., was putting out \u201cshoot-\u2018em-ups\u201d on a regular basis, and his favorite artist, James Allen St. John, had done six Western covers for them by 1923 and would do at least 30 by 1932. Western Story Magazine<\/em> had gone weekly almost three years back.<\/p>\r\n

The truth may have been that when it came to writing, Ed was a dreamer. He had tasted the dust of the cowboy life, the drudgery and aching legs that came with all day in the saddle. The boring food and the boring hours of hard work. To him there was little \u201cromance\u201d in the life of the \u201cwild west.\u201d He told Curtis Brown Ltd., his British agent, that the \u201c\u2026rather prosaic life of a cowpuncher will have to be speeded up a bit\u2026\u201d for the English audience. Nonetheless he started on it in March, 1923 and tried to base his characters on people he knew in his Idaho days, hoping they would give the story verisimilitude.<\/p>\r\n

Bob Davis encouraged the idea, urging Ed on with, \u201cI would print a western story from you in a minute. Let \u2018er go.\u201d But when he saw the final manuscript at the end of May he was flabbergasted. \u201cI can\u2019t understand how a bean as active as yours could refrain from butting in and slamming a few novelties into the good old powder-burned frontier,\u201d he grouched. The tale was riddled with inaccuracies, the dialogue was too modern, the cowboys had been paid by check, and the \u201cblack bandanna\u201d the bandit wore was an impossibility because bandannas were either red or yellow and covered with designs. Worst of all the plot was trite and weak. Davis sent it back with three pages of revisions.<\/p>\r\n

It was pretty clear that Ed\u2019s heart just wasn\u2019t in this one. \"\"<\/a>The Bandit of Hell\u2019s Bend<\/strong><\/em> saw light of day in Argosy All-Story Weekly,<\/em> in six parts in the fall of 1924, and McClurg published the book in June, 1925. Methuen, having initiated the whole thing, published it the following\u00a0 year. \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a> But SOME<\/em>body<\/span> really liked it. (continue to part 2<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\r\n

If you like this article, please click the “Like” button below and make a comment in the comment section. Thank you.<\/em><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Burroughs was really pissed off. Having just seen the color proofs for the dust-jacket of his new book from A.C. McClurg, Ed took to his typewriter to tell his editor, Joseph Bray, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thought about it. Among other things, he said this: \u201c\u2026 There is nothing of the … Continue reading “The Eight-year Novel, Part 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-publication"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3uw6J-gD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1198,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions\/1198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/recoverings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}