It is probably not surprising that a man nearly forty years of age, with a wife and children to support but no real taste for the pedestrian routines of business, should dream of being carried away to another planet or of being born in the jungle, free of civilization and its entanglements. What is surprising is that so much of the world should have found in his daydreams mythological figures.
Burroughs was born in Chicago, but he seems to have spent much of his young manhood yearning for the wide open freedom and independence of the West. In the vacations between his years at private schools (including a year at Phillips Academy) he joined his older brothers, who were trying to make a go of a ranch in Idaho; and after his graduation from the Michigan Military Academy he enlisted for a tour with the Seventh Cavalry in Arizona. The latter adventure, however, proved to be a great disappointment, and Burroughs's father was obliged to use political influence and the excuse of his son's youth and ill health to buy the young man's way out of his enlistment.
