Tarzan of the Apes

An English lord and his wife are put ashore on the West African coast and left there; within a year both are dead, and their infant son has been carried off and raised by an ape. Twenty years later the young man who calls himself Tarzan has taught himself to read from his dead father’s books without ever having heard English spoken — and a party from another ship is landed at the same spot, among them Jane Porter.

Edgar Rice Burroughs published the story in the magazine All-Story in October 1912 and in book form in 1914. It is the first of more than twenty Tarzan books and one of the most adapted stories of the century.

Readers should know that the novel carries the racial and hereditary assumptions of its time, in its treatment of Africans and of Tarzan’s inherited nobility alike.

Bibliomancer presents the text as written.