#edgarriceburroughs - Every Day With Edgar Rice Burroughs - May 19, 2025

 May 19, 2025 and the four hundredth and eighty-ninth anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s beheading at the tower of London. One of my friends, the late Anne Brown, and I celebrated this event annually. On this day eighty-nine years ago in 1936, Author and scholar Erling B. Holtsmark, Tarzan and Tradition Classical Myth in Popular Literature and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Twayne’s US Author Series, was born.

Jack received a B.A. in Greek from the University of California at Berkeley in 1959 and a Ph.D. in Classics from there in 1963. He taught Classics at the University of Iowa beginning in 1963. He was the department chair from 1982 through to 1993. Jack published numerous articles over the years on various topics including on Homer, Aeschylus, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Quintilian. Later in his career he became interested in contemporary literature and the Classics publishing his two books on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs and several articles on classics and contemporary cinema and on detective fiction.

As chair in Classics, Jack worked diligently to increase the number of English-language courses at the University of Iowa, including building up the course on Classical Mythology and Word Power.

The 100-word drabble for today, “By All the Gods,” is excerpted from the final paragraph of the article “Classical Images of Edgar Rice Burroughs,” written by well-respected Burroughs historian and researcher, Alan Hanson. Thanks Alan. Hope this finds you well.

The complete article may be read at: https://www.erbzine.com/mag66/6617.html

“The classical images in this essay are projections of a much deeper and detailed mythological vein that runs through the works of ERB. The formal education of his adolescence, as painful as he professed it to be, laid down in his psyche a firm appreciation for the classics. Years later in his writing that appreciation came out whether he willed it or not. The extent Burroughs is indebted to classical literature is debatable, but surely had its influence been missing from ERB’s fiction entirely, much of the beauty and majesty that gave this author staying power would have been lacking.”