May 6, 2025 and Star Wars Day part two, “May the Sith be With You, and eighty-five years ago on this day in 1940, the Honolulu Advertiser published an interview with Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I’ve been unable to find the entire interview, but www.erbzine has the following quotation from the article:
“I work just the same as any manufacturer . Sometimes I get disgusted with myself. When you've written a book about a character and told all yo can about him and then have to write about twenty more it gets to be a chore. I'd rather write along different lines... historical novels, for instance, but I've been typed! ... I guess I've always wished I could do the things Tarzan does, but now it's too late in life..”
ERB wasn’t the only writer to grow weary with writing adventures about the same character again and again. Arthur Conon Doyle tried to kill Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie came to hate Hercule Poirot and Louise May Alcott was more than a little worn out with writing about the Little Women. Lewis Carrol (Charles Dodson) said that he wished he’d never written about “Alice in Wonderland.”
For the record, after the interview only three more Tarzan novels were published and two of those were previously written. “Tarzan and the Foreign Legion” was released in 1947, “Tarzan and the Madman” in 1964 (The book was written prior to the 1940 interview), and “Tarzan and the Castaways” in 1965. (The first 2/3rds of which were written in 1939).
The fictional one hundred-word drabble for today, “Once More Into the Breech,” was inspired by the Edgar Rice Burroughs interview in the Honolulu Advertiser and by authors who grew tired of their own creations.
The writer for the Honolulu Observer asked, “Mr. Burroughs, if I understand correctly, you’re saying that you don’t want to write any more Tarzan novels.”
“I didn’t say that wouldn’t be another. Of course there will. What I said was I wanted to write other things. I’ve written westerns, contemporary novels, and newspaper articles, but folks just want to read another Tarzan book.”
“So does that mean that we’ll never see another Tarzan novel.”
“Of course there will be. He’s my jewel vault of Opar. Bills have to be paid and Tarzan is the hardest working man that I know.”
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