The Power of Numbers
Burroughs chalked his fame up to sheer numbers. He explained: “If you write one story, it may be bad. If you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” When he was asked what his aspirations were, the brutally honest writer simply expressed that it was indeed from a need to make money.
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“I have often been asked how I came to write,” Burroughs said. “The best answer is that I needed the money. When I started I was 35, and had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted.”
Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875, the son of a whiskey distiller from America’s earliest English Puritan settlers. Early on, he was sent to his brothers’ cattle ranch in Idaho.