Jungle Tales of Tarzan

What It's About

This collection of twelve loosely connected short stories follows Tarzan through his boyhood and adolescence in the African jungle, filling in a stretch of his youth well before he meets other white people. Each tale stands alone. Tarzan faces jungle predators, tangles with a vengeful witch-doctor, encounters the nearby villagers, and becomes caught up in a jealous rivalry over a young female ape called Teeka. The tone is more episodic and reflective than a conventional adventure novel, with moments of humour alongside the danger.

Key Concepts

The stories keep returning to identity: Tarzan is neither fully ape nor fully human, and he is only beginning to understand the difference. He searches for the source of dreams and the whereabouts of God, and experiences his first stirrings of love and jealousy. Beneath the action runs a contrast between civilisation and savagery. Like much of Burroughs's writing, the book reflects the racial attitudes of its time, and its portrayal of African characters will strike many modern readers as stereotyped and colonial.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was an American writer born in Chicago. After a string of unsuccessful jobs and business ventures, he turned to writing pulp fiction in his mid-thirties and became one of the best-selling and most influential popular authors of the twentieth century, best known as the creator of Tarzan.