Tarzan of the Apes

What It's About

An English nobleman and his wife are marooned on the wild coast of West Africa, where their infant son is born. When both parents die, the baby is adopted and raised by a fierce female ape and grows up as a member of her tribe, learning the language, customs and dangers of the jungle. As a boy he discovers the cabin his parents left behind, and from its books he teaches himself to read without ever having heard human speech. His isolated life changes when a party of Europeans arrives in the region, bringing him into contact with other humans for the first time. A fast-moving adventure of survival, rivalry and first encounters, the book set the template for Tarzan in popular fiction.

Key Concepts

The central question is nature versus nurture: does breeding or upbringing make the man? The novel keeps asking whether its hero's courage and sense of honour come from his noble blood or from the jungle that formed him, and it leans heavily on the former. It also sets the "civilized" against the "savage", often to the detriment of the supposedly civilized. The book is a product of its time, and modern readers will notice its colonial attitudes, its stereotyped depictions of African characters and its belief in inherited superiority. These have drawn sustained criticism, and they are worth reading with a critical eye.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was an American writer born in Chicago. He drifted through a string of jobs and business ventures before turning to fiction in his mid-thirties, selling stories to the pulp magazines. His imaginative, action-driven storytelling made him one of the most commercially successful and widely read popular authors of the twentieth century.