Edgar Rice Burroughs was supposed to be a lifelong failure.

Born in 1875, he flunked out of Phillips Academy, failed examinations to get into West Point and due to a weak heart, was discharged from the army. His brother loaned him some cash to open a stationery store, but his business quickly went bust. From there, he went to work at his dad’s storage battery business, and in 1900, 25-years-old and recently married, he was pulling in a whopping $15 a week. Three years later, one of his other brothers gave him a job at his gold dredging business, but then that company fell apart. Burroughs subsequently shuffled through a series of jobs selling electric light bulbs, candy and Stoddard Lectures. Anything to keep the lights on.

None of these jobs changed his lot in life. Burroughs was, ostensibly, still a loser. “I had decided I was a total failure,” he said. And indeed, he was. That didn’t stop him from trying, though.

Burroughs soon found a company looking to hire an accountant, and not knowing anything at all about accounting, bravely applied for the job and got it. He was lucky that his employer knew even less about accounting than he did, but he didn’t last long as an accountant anyway. He then tried his hand at the mail-order business, landing a job at a company and quickly advancing to the head of his department. Then his wife gave birth to their first child.

With another mouth to feed and the entrepreneurial bug in his veins, he decided to go into business for himself. This was probably among the dumbest decisions Burroughs ever made, because he had no startup money and when it was all said and done, he shuttered the business while deep in the red. Luckily, the mail-order company he’d previously worked at offered him an opportunity to come back, and it was at this point that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ life could have gone in two very different directions.

“I would probably have been fixed for life with a good living salary,” Burroughs said. “[But] occasionally it is better to do the wrong thing than the right.”

With his business gone, and perhaps having erred in declining to return to his old employer, Burroughs now had no job, no money, and also had another mouth to feed — his wife had just given birth their second child. Needing food, he pawned his family’s belongings, applied for any jobs he could find and waited for God to send him a sign that all was not lost. And then, finally, he landed a gig as a lowly sales agent for a pencil sharpener company. It was there, as legend has it, that while other agents were out trying to sell pencil sharpeners, Burroughs finally sat down at a desk and changed his entire life.

“I knew nothing about the technique of story writing,” said Burroughs. “[But] had good reason for thinking I could sell what I wrote.”

So, in 1911, at the age of 35, with years of failure burning him up inside, Burroughs began penning the story that would eventually become A Princess of Mars. Embarrassed that his pursuits would be considered childish— because what sensible 35-year-old man with a family thinks about Mars? — he didn’t tell his wife or friends that he was doing it. He just did it. When he was done, knowing absolutely nothing about publishing, he blindly sent the first 43,000 words to a magazine called The All-Story. To his chagrin, an editor there, Thomas Newell Metcalf, took a liking to the story, and helped him shape it up. Metcalf suggested he add another 30,000 words, effectively making it into a complete novel, and after that, he’d publish it. Burroughs agreed and in February 1912, the first part of A Princess of Mars began being serialized in The All-Story.

Burroughs was paid $400 for the rights to the story. Today, that would yield him, the struggling businessman with a family to feed and nothing but failure on his resume, a grand sum of $9,664.13!

Though this was a decent amount, even back then, it wasn't enough money to drastically alter the direction of things. Burroughs was still working a job that didn’t match his expenses and it wasn’t until he landed another gig, at a business magazine, that the course he was on really started to shift. While employed at that job, which finally earned him a decent wage— certainly enough to maybe relax a bit— he spent his nights not out drinking with buddies or his holidays vacationing in the Caymans, but rather, toiling away in obscurity, shaping the sentences and paragraphs of the novel that would introduce one of the most iconic characters in the history of all popular art— Tarzan of the Apes.

“Tarzan of the Apes” was published as book in 1914.

The rights to the first Tarzan story were initially purchased for $700 and even though he’d gotten more money for it, Burroughs, like most artists, doubted that the yarn was very good at all. He was surprised that it sold. But his popularity as a writer was growing and from then, he would continue to get more and more money for his stories. Still, it wasn’t quite enough, and with no royalties earned from magazine sales, he decided that books were the next logical step.

According to Burroughs, every major book publisher in the country turned down Tarzan of the Apes. For some reason— maybe because Burroughs didn’t have enough Twitter followers or Facebook likes— they didn’t think there was a there there. But a clairvoyant editor at the newspaper The Evening World — the Buzzfeed or VOX of its day — saw Burroughs vision and began serializing the story. The serialization lead to other papers doing the same— I think we call that aggregation now, except nobody gets paid for it — and with its popularity among readers at a fever pitch, the publisher A.C. McClurg & Co., which had initially told Burroughs to effectively go fuck himself, came back and asked to publish it as a book.

Tarzan’s popularity proved to be explosive, going on to sell millions of copies and being translated into more languages than human beings are even capable of speaking. Heck, even aliens know who Tarzan is. The books— overtly racist as they are; remember this was the early 1900s— were eventually turned into comics, radio shows, movies and other merchandise. Burroughs, after all his years of failing, had finally found something he was good at. And he was not a dummy in the least— he knew how to turn a nickel into a dime. It’s just that before Tarzan, he’d rarely had a nickel to start with.