Tarzan

Tarzan is the central character of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, an adventure story first published complete in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story and issued as a 400-page book by A. C. McClurg in 1914. The work launched a series that Burroughs continued into the 1940s with approximately two dozen sequels. Britannica describes 25 Tarzan books in total and reports that the successful sequels sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. [S1] [S2] [S6] [S7]

Within the original novel, Tarzan is the orphaned child of English aristocrats, reared in equatorial Africa by a community of fictional great apes. He develops into an exceptional hunter and fighter, becomes king of the apes, encounters Jane Porter and other outsiders, learns spoken European languages, and discovers that he is John Clayton II, heir to the Greystoke title. His familiar identity as a jungle sovereign therefore combines two statuses: authority earned among the apes and inherited rank within English aristocracy. [S1] [S2] [S3]

The common description that Tarzan was “raised by gorillas” is imprecise when applied to Burroughs’s original text. The novel distinguishes Tarzan’s adoptive apes from a separate “huge gorilla” that attacks him; the book’s chapter list likewise identifies both “The Apes” and later jungle battles. “Raised by great apes” is consequently the more accurate literary description, although the precise real-world species of the fictional community is not established by the supplied authoritative evidence. [S2] [S3]

Creation and publication

Burroughs reached fiction after a varied working life. Before publishing stories, he had served in the United States cavalry, mined gold in Oregon, worked as an Idaho cowboy and a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City, and owned unsuccessful businesses. According to the biographical account summarized in the sources, dissatisfaction with existing pulp reading encouraged him to try writing comparable material himself. [S2]

Publication dates can appear contradictory because they refer to different formats. The story made its first public appearance in The All-Story in October 1912, where it was printed as a complete novel; the hardcover edition followed in June 1914. Thus, calling it a “1912 novel” identifies its original magazine publication, while Britannica’s 1914 date and the McClurg bibliographic record identify the book edition. [S1] [S2] [S6] [S7]

Claims about literary influence are also contested. The Jungle Book has sometimes been proposed as a model, and Rudyard Kipling remarked that Burroughs had reworked its motif. Burroughs himself instead named the Roman story of Romulus and Remus as his sole inspiration. The evidence therefore supports a distinction between Burroughs’s stated source and a resemblance recognized by others, not a definitive conclusion that Kipling directly inspired the novel. [S2]

Parentage and abandonment in Africa

The narrative begins with John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, and his recently married wife, Alice Rutherford. Clayton receives a British Colonial Office appointment involving an investigation into the abusive recruitment and continued servitude of Black British subjects by another European power. In May 1888 the couple sail from Dover, reach Freetown a month later, and charter the Fuwalda for the remainder of the journey. They disappear from public knowledge after leaving port, while wreckage later found at St. Helena persuades authorities that their vessel was lost. [S3]

The broader plot account explains that the couple are marooned in the western coastal jungle of equatorial Africa. Their son, John Clayton II, is born there. Alice dies from malaria when the child is about one year old, and the ape leader Kerchak kills his father soon afterward. Kala, a female ape whose own infant has died, adopts the surviving human child. The apes call him Tarzan, translated in the supplied plot account as “White Skin,” and he grows up unaware of his biological identity. [S2]

Education and ascent among the apes

Tarzan’s childhood is defined by physical difference and intellectual self-education. Alienated from the young apes because he does not resemble them, he finds the cabin built by his human parents. Illustrated primers enable him, over years of effort, to teach himself to read English. Because he has never heard English spoken, literacy initially gives him no ability to speak it. [S2]

The cabin also supplies a decisive material connection to his father: a knife. Tarzan uses it to kill a huge gorilla that attacks and badly wounds him. As he matures, he becomes a formidable hunter, provoking Kerchak’s jealousy. When Kerchak eventually attacks him, Tarzan kills the ape leader and assumes the position of king of the apes—the basis of his early sovereignty and of the “Lord of the Apes” designation associated with the character. [S1] [S2]

Kala’s death produces one of the novel’s darkest turns. After a Black African hunting party settles nearby, one of its members kills her. Tarzan takes revenge on the killer, raids the community for weapons, and subjects its inhabitants to cruel tricks. They interpret him as an evil spirit and attempt to appease him. These events make racial conflict and colonial representation structural elements of the original story rather than incidental details of its setting. [S2]

Jane Porter and contact with human society

At the age of 21, Tarzan encounters another party stranded on the coast. Its members include 19-year-old Jane Porter, the daughter of an American scientist, and William Cecil Clayton, Tarzan’s cousin and the unwitting occupant of the estate that properly belongs to him. Jane is the first white woman Tarzan has seen. He observes the newcomers, helps them without initially revealing himself, and rescues Jane from dangers in the jungle. [S1] [S2]

A subsequent ship brings the French naval officer Paul D’Arnot. Tarzan rescues D’Arnot from the local African community, but D’Arnot’s crew recovers the other castaways and leaves Africa while believing both men dead. D’Arnot then teaches Tarzan spoken French and instructs him in the conduct expected among Europeans, enabling Tarzan to move from self-taught literacy toward participation in Western society. [S2]

Tarzan ultimately follows Jane to northern Wisconsin and saves her from a fire. By then she is engaged to another man. Evidence recovered from his parents’ cabin allows D’Arnot to establish that Tarzan is John Clayton II, Earl of Greystoke. Nevertheless, Tarzan conceals and renounces his claim rather than displace William, choosing what he understands to be Jane’s happiness over his title and inheritance. Britannica’s compressed summary says that he eventually reclaims his noble title, but the fuller plot of the first novel ends with him withholding that identity; the apparent difference is best understood as Britannica summarizing the broader Tarzan story rather than the first book’s precise conclusion. [S1] [S2]

Defining characteristics

Adaptability and self-creation

Tarzan crosses boundaries that organize the novel: animal and human society, jungle and Western civilization, acquired behavior and inherited identity. He learns woodland survival from the apes, independently deciphers written English, learns French conversation from D’Arnot, and adapts to European social expectations. Yet the revelation of his birth does not simply replace his jungle identity; at the first novel’s close, he actively chooses whether to disclose his aristocratic status. [S2]

Physical power and violence

His authority is repeatedly established through violence. He survives the gorilla attack, defeats Kerchak, becomes an expert hunter, avenges Kala, rescues endangered outsiders, and overcomes threats in both Africa and Wisconsin. The original chapter sequence reinforces this progression through such headings as “Jungle Battles,” “The Tree-top Hunter,” “King of the Apes,” “The Call of the Primitive,” “Heredity,” and “The Height of Civilization.” [S2] [S3] [S7]

Loyalty and self-denial

Three relationships reveal different aspects of Tarzan’s loyalty. Kala is his adoptive mother, and her killing prompts sustained revenge. D’Arnot becomes his guide into spoken language and European society while also helping prove his ancestry. Jane is both his principal romantic attachment and the reason he suppresses his claim to the Greystoke inheritance at the conclusion of the first novel. [S2]

Major relationships

• Kala: The widowed female ape who adopts Tarzan after losing her own infant. She gives him a family within the ape community, and her death becomes a central motive for his retaliation against a nearby human settlement. [S2]
• Kerchak: The ape leader who kills Tarzan’s father, later grows jealous of Tarzan, and finally dies fighting him. Tarzan succeeds him as king. [S2]
• John and Alice Clayton: Tarzan’s biological parents, whose cabin, books, knife, records, and possessions provide the material route by which he discovers humanity and his ancestry. [S2] [S3]
• Jane Porter: The American scientist’s daughter whom Tarzan protects and pursues from Africa to Wisconsin. Her engagement to another man leads him to conceal his inheritance. [S1] [S2]
• Paul D’Arnot: The French officer whom Tarzan rescues. D’Arnot teaches him spoken French and Western manners and establishes his legal identity from evidence in the cabin. [S2]
• William Cecil Clayton: Tarzan’s cousin and the unknowing beneficiary of Tarzan’s absence. Tarzan declines to reveal the evidence that would displace him. [S2]

Themes and critical interpretation

Heredity, environment, and civilization

Burroughs identified heredity in conflict with environment as a central concern of the novel. Tarzan is raised outside human society but is repeatedly represented as possessing qualities linked by the narrative to ancestry; at the same time, his practical abilities, language, and social behavior are learned in radically different environments. Modern scholarship consequently examines heredity alongside Tarzan’s uncertain status between “civilized” humanity and jungle life. [S2]

The chapter titles make that debate explicit rather than merely implicit. “Man’s Reason,” “His Own Kind,” “The Call of the Primitive,” “Heredity,” and “The Height of Civilization” map Tarzan’s passage through competing definitions of humanity. His story does not proceed simply from ignorance to civilization: it repeatedly compares the capacities and violence of jungle creatures, African communities, sailors, aristocrats, and other representatives of Western society. [S3] [S7]

Race and imperialism

Scholars identify racial superiority as a major theme in Tarzan of the Apes, and a comparative postcolonial study places the novel in dialogue with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. That study argues that both works construct an idea of Africa through discourses involving imperialism and racism, despite their conventional positions on opposite sides of the distinction between high literature and popular culture. [S2] [S4]

The plot itself supplies the basis for such criticism. Tarzan’s name is translated through skin color; the story differentiates communities through racialized language; and his conflict with the nearby Black settlement includes revenge, theft, terror, and the inhabitants’ belief that he is supernatural. Meanwhile, the opening Colonial Office mission concerns European exploitation of Africans through deceptive recruitment and coerced service. These elements place both European imperial abuse and degrading racial representation within the same narrative. [S2] [S3]

Masculinity, sexuality, and escapism

Critical discussion has also treated Tarzan through sexuality and escapism, while scholarship on race and masculinity includes him among cultural figures used to study how masculine identities are formed through race, ethnicity, performance, and spectatorship. His literary identity—as an aristocratic heir, physically dominant jungle fighter, outsider to conventional society, and romantic protector—provides several overlapping models of manhood rather than a single uncomplicated ideal. [S2] [S8]

Gore Vidal and other commentators in popular culture have emphasized Tarzan’s escapist appeal. That appeal is grounded in a premise that permits movement between radically different worlds: an individual can possess jungle freedom and strength while also gaining literacy, noble ancestry, romance, and access to Western society. Scholarly attention to race, sexuality, heredity, and civilization shows, however, that the fantasy carries ideological assumptions as well as adventurous wish fulfillment. [S2]

Series, adaptations, and cultural legacy

The success of Tarzan of the Apes turned one pulp adventure into a long-running literary series. Sources describe Burroughs as writing 25 Tarzan books in all, or the original followed by roughly two dozen sequels, with continuation into the 1940s. Britannica reports worldwide sales exceeding 25 million copies for the successful series. [S1] [S2]

Tarzan quickly moved beyond print fiction. A silent film appeared in 1918, and the character subsequently became a durable presence in films, comic strips, radio, and television. Britannica places him in nearly 30 novels when the wider body of appearances is counted, while its more specific account identifies 25 Tarzan books by Burroughs; these figures refer to different scopes rather than necessarily contradicting one another. [S1]

The original pulp appearance has itself become a major collecting artifact. A collector’s account calls the October 1912 All-Story one of the rarest and most valuable pulp issues, reporting sales above $25,000 for a damaged copy and above $50,000 for a better one. Those figures are anecdotal market observations from a collecting essay rather than a comprehensive price record, but they illustrate the extraordinary status attached to Tarzan’s first publication. [S6]

Tarzan’s legacy is therefore double. He remains an iconic adventure figure whose name evokes wilderness mastery, extraordinary physical ability, and movement between nature and civilization. At the same time, scholars continue to use the character to examine racial hierarchy, colonial ideas about Africa, inherited privilege, sexuality, escapism, and the cultural construction of masculinity. [S1] [S2] [S4] [S8]

Concise chronology

• May 1888: John and Alice Clayton sail from Dover toward Africa; they reach Freetown approximately a month later and continue aboard the Fuwalda. [S3]
• After their marooning: John Clayton II is born in the equatorial African jungle. Alice dies when he is about one, and Kerchak kills his father. Kala adopts the infant and he becomes Tarzan. [S2]
• Childhood and adolescence: Tarzan finds the cabin, teaches himself to read English, survives a gorilla attack, develops as a hunter, kills Kerchak, and becomes king of the apes. [S2]
• Age 21: He encounters Jane Porter and her companions, followed by Paul D’Arnot. [S2]
• Later in the first novel: D’Arnot teaches him French and Western behavior; Tarzan follows Jane to Wisconsin; his identity as Greystoke is proved, but he suppresses the claim for Jane’s sake. [S2]
• October 1912: The All-Story publishes the complete story. [S2] [S6]
• June 1914: A. C. McClurg publishes the book edition. [S2] [S7]
• 1918: A silent-film adaptation appears. [S1]
• Into the 1940s: Burroughs continues the series through approximately two dozen sequels. [S2]

Frequently asked questions

Was Tarzan raised by gorillas?

Not exactly. The first novel says that Kala and a tribe of great apes raise him, while separately describing a huge gorilla as an enemy Tarzan kills. “Raised by apes” is more faithful to Burroughs’s narrative than “raised by gorillas.” [S2] [S3]

What is Tarzan’s real name?

He is John Clayton II, the son of Lord and Lady Greystoke and ultimately the Earl of Greystoke. “Tarzan” is the name given to him in the apes’ language. [S2]

When did Tarzan first appear?

Tarzan first appeared in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story. The story became a hardcover book in 1914, which explains why both years are associated with the novel. [S1] [S2] [S6] [S7]

How does Tarzan learn English?

He uses illustrated primers found in his parents’ cabin to teach himself written English over many years. Because he has not heard the language, he initially cannot speak it; D’Arnot later teaches him spoken French rather than English. [S2]

Does Tarzan reclaim the Greystoke inheritance in the first novel?

No. Although D’Arnot proves his identity, Tarzan conceals it and leaves William Cecil Clayton in possession because Jane is engaged to another man. Broader summaries that say Tarzan eventually reclaims his title refer beyond the first novel’s immediate ending. [S1] [S2]

Why is Tarzan still critically important?

Beyond his popularity, Tarzan is studied as a figure through whom adventure fiction addresses heredity and environment, civilization and primitivism, race, imperialism, sexuality, escapism, and masculinity. Those concerns connect the character’s fantasy of jungle freedom to the political and cultural assumptions embedded in the story. [S2] [S4] [S8]