Burroughs drifted across the United States until he was thirty-six, holding seventeen consecutive careers before he published stories.[5] He worked as a U.S. cavalryman, a gold miner in Oregon, a cowboy in Idaho, a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, and an owner of several failed businesses.[6] He decided to write his own pulp fiction after being disappointed by the reading material others offered, and worked in that capacity for four years before his first novel, Tarzan of the Apes, was published.[6][7] Tarzan first appeared in The All-Story in October 1912. The All-Story published it in its entirety in installments, and it was published in 1914 as a novel.[1]
Though The Jungle Book is sometimes cited as an influence on Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, he claimed that his only inspiration was the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus.[7] Rudyard Kipling commented that Burroughs "had 'jazzed' the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, thoroughly enjoyed himself."[8]
