around Burroughs’s ranch, the first Tarzana post office opens. Despite his success with his Tarzan enterprise, Burroughs fails at other business ventures, including several investments in airplane technology. During the 1930s H. P. Lovecraft begins publishing science fiction works, increasing the popularity of the genre.

1932 The premiere of the first Tarzan “talkie,” Tarzan, the ApeMan, is a big success; even Burroughs is pleased with the film, which stars Johnny Weissmuller. The first Tarzan radio show airs.

1934 Flying lessons are Burroughs’s favorite pastime. He falls in love with an actress, Florence Dearholt; he and Emma divorce. Concerned that he is not considered a serious writer, he writes several pieces under pseudonyms, including an epic poem about Genghis Khan; most are rejected.

1935 Edgar and Florence marry; they spend their honeymoon sailing and learning to surf in Hawaii.

1940 In response to financial difficulties, Burroughs and his family move to Hawaii.

1941 Florence leaves Edgar, who consequently suffers from ill health and depression; the two divorce. He witnesses the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later becomes a columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser.

1942 Burroughs becomes a war correspondent in the South Pacific.

1945 George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears.

1949 After years of ill health, Burroughs suffers a massive heart attack.

1950 On March 19 Edgar Rice Burroughs dies in Encino, California, while reading the Sunday comics; he is buried in Tarzana.

INTRODUCTION

It’s a Man’s World

Tarzan, like Peter Pan before him, has taken flight from the pages of a book to become a character with a life apart, the life of an icon, someone everybody knows. Tarzan, like a figure of folklore, seems to have emerged from our collective imagination, not the mind of a single author. But Tarzan is the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had considered calling him Zartan or Tublat-Zan. Tarzan was born here, in this novel that was first published in The All-Story, a pulp-fiction magazine, in October 1912.

Tarzan of the Apes is a book full of surprises. It is a compendium of pseudo-scientific ideas from the early decades of the twentieth century, theories of white racial superiority and also of the degeneracy of the white race through over-civilization, ideas about the inheritance of learned traits, and, indirectly, about creating a superior race through “breeding” and forced sterilization. It is also a work of stupendous popular appeal, packed with immediate, intense gratification. A male answer to the female romance novel, it is a fantasy of dominance and potency written with complete abandon. Here is fantasy super-sized, offering Americans their very first superhero, and perhaps their first experience of becoming part of an audience engaged in mass identification, the kind of experience we have since grown accustomed to in the movies.

Tarzan’s idealized manhood speaks directly to a recognizable daydream of what would happen if one could shed civilization, along with the demoralizing, inhibiting, and feminizing forces of domesticity and modern living. Tarzan appeals to the feeling that, like Clark Kent, Superman’s alter-ego, all men have a Tarzan hidden under their everyday facades. Tarzan knows only freedom and autonomy. Having nobody to please but himself, he is exuberantly unencumbered by responsibilities, mundane obligations, opposing opinions, and the ambivalence produced by reflection. Tarzan makes ruthlessness look good. Living by his wits and brute strength, he experiences the masculine authenticity that modern life deprives men of.

Tarzan of the Apes was a runaway success when it first appeared. Before he knew it, Burroughs had created a Tarzan industry. He struck deals for daily Tarzan newspaper comic strips and movies (and, later, radio shows), and he licensed Tarzan statuettes, Tarzan bubble gum, Tarzan bathing suits, and an assortment of other merchandizing ventures. Burroughs would write twenty-three Tarzan sequels, and estimates of his lifetime sales range between 30 and 60 million books.

With all the enthusiasm came detractors, those who said Tarzan was unoriginal, his hero just a variation on Kipling’s Mowgli, who, in The Jungle Books, is adopted as an infant by wolves. Kipling himself was of this opinion, writing in his autobiography, “If it be in your power, bear serenely with imitators. My Jungle Book begot Zoos of them. But the genius of all genii was the one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes. I read it, but regret I never saw it on the films, where it rages most successfully. He had jazzed the motif of the Jungle Books, and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself” (Something of Myself, p. 237; see “For Further Reading’).

In some respects, Tarzan is a distant descendant of frontier legends such as Daniel