Brother Men

<div><i>Brother Men</i> is the first published collection of private letters of Edgar Rice Burroughs the phenomenally successful author of adventure fantasy and science fiction tales including the Tarzan series. The correspondence presented here is Burroughs's decades-long exchange with Herbert T. Weston the maternal great-grandfather of this volume's editor Matt Cohen. The trove of correspondence Cohen discovered unexpectedly during a visit home includes hundreds of items-letters photographs telegrams postcards and illustrations-spanning from 1903 to 1945. Since Weston kept carbon copies of his own letters the material documents a lifelong friendship that had begun in the 1890s when the two men met in military school. In these letters Burroughs and Weston discuss their experiences of family work war disease and health sports and new technology over a period spanning two world wars the Great Depression and widespread political change. Their exchanges provide a window into the personal writings of the legendary creator of Tarzan and reveal Burroughs's ideas about race nation and what it meant to be a man in early-twentieth-century America.<p>The Burroughs-Weston letters trace a fascinating personal and business relationship that evolved as the two men and their wives embarked on joint capital ventures traveled frequently and navigated the difficult waters of child-rearing divorce and aging. <i>Brother Men</i> includes never-before-published images annotations and a critical introduction in which Cohen explores the significance of the sustained emotional male friendship evident in the letters. Rich with insights related to visual culture and media technologies consumerism the history of the family the history of authorship and readership and the development of the West these letters make it clear that Tarzan was only one small part of Edgar Rice Burroughs's broad engagement with modern culture.<i><br></i></p></div>