The Son of Tarzan

The Son of Tarzan was published in 1915 and is built around Jack Clayton, Tarzan and Jane’s son, who has been raised in London but is unmistakably his father’s child. As a teenager he runs away from home with the great ape Akut, ends up in Africa, and effectively replays his father’s origin story in compressed form. He acquires the jungle name Korak the Killer. He falls in love with Meriem, a young woman who has been raised by a Bedouin sheikh after being kidnapped as a child from her aristocratic French family.

The novel functions almost as a parallel narrative to Tarzan of the Apes, with the new generation finding their own voices in the same jungle. Tarzan and Jane appear toward the end, when the families are eventually reunited. Korak goes on to become a major character throughout the rest of the series. The novel is sometimes ranked among the strongest middle-period Tarzan books because of the freshness Korak’s perspective brings. Read after The Beasts of Tarzan.