Tarzan of the Apes

Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, just months after A Princess of Mars, and the book made him one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. The novel is the origin story. Lord and Lady Greystoke, marooned on the West African coast in the 1880s, build a small cabin and have a son. They die. The infant is adopted by the great ape Kala and grows up in the jungle as Tarzan, learning to read English from his dead parents’ books, swinging through the trees, killing leopards, and eventually meeting the first humans he has ever seen.

Those humans include Jane Porter, the daughter of an American professor whose expedition has been marooned on the same coast. Tarzan falls in love with Jane on sight. He saves the expedition repeatedly. He follows Jane back to Wisconsin in the second act, learns French and English, and presents himself to her in human society without revealing his actual identity. The novel ends with one of the most famous lines in pulp fiction, which the original 1932 film changed to Me Tarzan, you Jane, but which Burroughs himself never wrote. The book is brisk, melodramatic, and the foundation of the largest single-author adventure franchise of its era.