Interesting Facts about Tarzan | Interesting Literature Interesting Facts about Tarzan Posted by interestingliterature Fun trivia about Tarzan and his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs Ray Bradbury called Tarzan’s creator ‘probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.’ What prompted such a statement? There’s no doubt that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation has become world-famous, but what is it about Tarzan that makes him such a famous character, whose name is known throughout the world? This post, which presents some of our favourite interesting facts about Tarzan, aims to get to the bottom of the character’s enduring popularity. Before he became a successful writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs worked as a pencil sharpener salesman. Burroughs, a budding writer at the time, came up with Tarzan because his previous story was rejected for publication. This has to go down in literary history as one of the more fortunate literary rejections: having been tasked with writing a medieval romance in the mould of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Burroughs dashed off The Outlaw of Torn (1927) in just two weeks.

However, his publisher turned it down and instead, Burroughs wrote his first Tarzan novel, in the process inventing one of the most instantly recognisable fictional characters of all time. (More information on the genesis of Tarzan can be found here and here .) Before Burroughs settled on the name Tarzan for his feral hero, he considered two other names: Zantar (which is obviously very close to the eventual name) and Tublat Zan. ‘Tarzan’, it turns out, is a Hebrew word that translates as ‘dandy, fop, or coxcomb’ . Whether Burroughs was aware of this is unknown. What is Tarzan’s real name? There are two answers to this question. Tarzan’s real name is John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke. Tarzan is his ape name; his English name was revealed by Burroughs in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. However, there’s some doubt as to whether even this is his real name: in Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs suggests that Clayton is itself a fictitious name, invented by ‘Tarzan’ to mask his real identity.

Such mystery only fuelled readers’ interest in the character, himself something of a man of mystery – where had he come from? What was his life like before his life in the jungle? Tarzan’s girlfriend, of course, is called Jane. But what is less well known is that Tarzan’s fictional adventures living among the apes inspired a real-life Jane, Jane Goodall, to devote her life to a study of primates in the wild, after she discovered the character when she was 11 years old. Why has Tarzan endured as a fictional character, even if few people now read Burroughs’ original novels? There are arguably several reasons: he is the archetypal ‘noble savage’, a figure found throughout literature but perhaps most clearly and successfully typified by Burroughs’ hero. The idea of leaving behind civilised society and returning to the primitive world of our primate ancestors among the jungle is a powerful one in many readers’ – and movie-goers’ – imaginations. Burroughs was also the author of The Land That Time Forgot (1918), which remains widely known – thought not as widely read – thanks to a series of film adaptations.

This fact itself sheds light on the Tarzan mythos: something about the primitive history of our species, and of the world before our species arose, speaks to us. Consider the popularity of Jurassic Park (whose curious background story we unearthed in our Five Fascinating Facts about Michael Crichton ), or Conan Doyle’s earlier novel, The Lost World (1912). But another reason that Tarzan endures in the popular imagination is that Burroughs did everything he could to make sure Tarzan endured: after writing the original novels, he turned his character into a brand, with numerous films, comic strips, and other works contributing to the ubiquity of Tarzan in everyone’s consciousness. The region of Tarzana in Los Angeles is named after the ranch Burroughs bought there shortly after Tarzan became a huge literary success. The famous line ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ never appeared in any of Burroughs’ books, nor in the films: it appears to have been a compacting of a longer conversation between Tarzan and Jane in the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man. Tarzan’s afterlife in the cinema has been huge, with some ninety film adaptations.

Burroughs himself has some interesting film connections: his daughter Joan married James Pierce, who played Tarzan on film, while Burroughs’ great-grandson is the film director Wes Anderson. If you enjoyed these interesting facts about Tarzan, check out our interesting Jungle Book facts. Edgar Rice Burroughs | All You Can Books | AllYouCanBooks.com A Princess of Mars Part One of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars-Series. Easy, swank, pulp read about an omnipotent gentleman teleported to Mars, finding an outlandish society of ape-, tree- and lizardmen, red-, white-, yellowmen, brains on legs, strange bastions and curious apparatuses, where the strongest survives and... Tarzan of the Apes Tarzan of the Apes is Burroughs’ exciting story of an English lord, left by the death of his stranded parents in the hands of a motherly African ape who raises him as her own. Although he is aware that he is different from the apes of his tribe, who are neither white nor hairless, he... The Lost Continent The novel, set in the year 2137, was heavily influenced by the events of World War I.

In the future world depicted in the novel, Europe has descended into barbarism while an isolationist Western Hemisphere remains sheltered from the destruction. The title Beyond Thirty refers to the degree of... Pellucidar Pellucidar is a fictional “Hollow Earth” milieu invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series of action adventure stories. The stories initially involve the adventures of mining heir David Innes and his inventor friend Abner Perry after they use an “iron mole” to burrow 500 miles into the earth’... Tarzan the Terrible In the previous novel, during the early days of World War I, Tarzan discovered that his wife Jane was not killed in a fire set by German troops, but was in fact alive. In this novel two months have gone by and Tarzan is continuing to search for Jane. He has tracked her to a hidden valley called... Tarzan the Untamed This book follows Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar chronologically. The action is set during World War I. While away from his plantation home in East Africa, invading German troops destroy it and kill his wife Jane and the Waziri warrior Wasimbu who is left crucified. Tarzan's search for vengeance...

Jungle Tales of Tarzan Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of twelve loosely-connected short stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, comprising the sixth book in order of publication in his series about the title character Tarzan. Chronologically, the events recounted in it actually occur between chapters 12 and... ERBzine 0320: Tarzan Was Born In Chicago I Edgar Rice Burroughs ~ James Allen St. John ~ Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan was not born in Africa. He was born in Chicago and so was his biographer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Chicago is in fact Tarzan town because it is not only the birthplace of Tarzan and his creator Burroughs, but also because James Allen St. John, best illustrator of Burroughsï¿½ novels, was born on the South Side. And Johnny Weissmuller, longest lived of the movie Tarzans, got his basic education as Lord of the Jungle on the beach at Fullerton Avenue.

Burroughsï¿½ novels have sold something over fifty-five million copies, have been translated into thirty-six languages, and his most famed character, Tarzan, has had enormous coverage in such disparate media as radio, television, and comic strips, as well as on sweat shirts, and ice cream wrappers, and even two towns were named for him. St. John, a well-known painter, illustrated almost all of the Tarzan books and a great number of Burroughsï¿½ other works. Weissmuller, undoubtedly the worldï¿½s most famous swimmer, was Tarzan of the movies for seventeen years and his ape-manï¿½s yell loses nothing in translation for audiences all over the world ï¿½ India, Africa, South America, and Asia, including even Russia and China. I first learned about Tarzan when I was eight years old. I heard my brother dying in the backyard and ran into the house to tell my mother about it. He was, after all, her first born and she would have to learn sometime.

ï¿½Ernest is being killed!ï¿½ ï¿½No,ï¿½ she said calmly, continuing to sort shirts, ï¿½he is merely giving vent to the victory cry of the bull ape. He does it rather wellï¿½ This story is told in the family to illustrate my motherï¿½s imperturbability, along with the yarn about the time she threw my fatherï¿½s pay check in the fire thinking it was a Lucky Strike package. She was imperturbable and she damned well had to be in those days when every able-bodied young male in the neighborhood was Tarzan and very vocal about it while hanging from our family tree. Our backyard was the largest for several blocks around, and the tree was the biggest, ideal for sitting in and hollering at each other, trying to echo Tarzan-Weissmullerï¿½s victory cry of the bull ape. The victory cry of the bull ape, by the way, is indistinguishable from the ceremonial cry of the bull ape, which is voiced during the intricacies of the Dance of the Dum-Dum. We had a Dum-Dum, a mound of clay in the middle of our yard.

This when beaten very hard with a stick sounded exactly like a mound of clay being hit hard with a stick. The tribe of Kerchak, Tarzanï¿½s foster family, got a much better acoustical effect from their drum, but then they had more trees as sounding boards. Each new Tarzan adventure was read by the members of the Wilson Avenue branch of the tribe of Kerchak as soon as someone in the group could afford it. The books were passed from paw to paw and we talked ape talk to each other, discussing methods of doing in lions with pocket knives and scaling rocky cliffs aided only by sinewy muscles and a grass rope. I knew Tarzan pretty well and can still quote full chapters of his life. But only recently did I find out anything much about his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs. And his life reads like fiction, except that its author seems to have been Horatio Alger ï¿½ not Burroughs. Burroughs was born in home, September 1, 1875. The house, in what is now the 1800 block of West Washington Street was probably a substantial one since his parents, George T.

and Mary E., were able to send their son to a succession of good schools and, according to one account, gave him a monthly allowance of 150 dollars. In an article in the New York Sunday World, October 27, 1929 Burroughs broadly covered his career up to the time he hit the publishing world a full circuit clout. ï¿½I was born in Chicago. After epidemics had closed two schools that I attended my parents shipped me to a cattle ranch in Idaho where I rode for my brothers who were only recently out of college and had entered the cattle business as the best way of utilizing their Yale degrees. Later I was dropped from Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; flunked examinations for West Point and was discharged from the Army on account of a weak heart. But my brother Henry backed me in setting up a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho. That didnï¿½t last long either.ï¿½ This brief admission only hints at Burroughsï¿½ life-long affection for the military, instilled perhaps at military academics. At one time he sought a commission in the Chinese army, then seeking new talent from overseas. However they did not want him.

He tried to get a commission in the Nicaraguan army, but his father had it cancelled. At age twenty he enlisted in the Seventh Cavalry but instead of fighting Indians was assigned to dig ditches. He volunteered somewhat later for the Rough Riders, but got a note of regret from Teddy Roosevelt instead of a commission. In 1900 Burroughs was again in Chicago with his wife Emma, daughter of Colonel Alvin Hulbert, owner of Chicagoï¿½s Tremont House and later of the Sherman House, as well as several other hotels in Chicago and St. Louis. Their address is given in an old city directory as 194 Park Avenue. This address is now 2004 West Maple Avenue. The following year the directory shows that they had moved to 134 Robey Street. Robey Street has since gone the way of Park and the address would now be 445 North Damen Avenue. From 1900 to 1903 Burroughs worked for his father who was president of the American Battery Company.

It was a dull life, he found, and besides he did not get along very well with his father so he and Emma joined his brothers, who had switched from cattle ranching to placer mining in Oregon. The gold mining effort failed. Edgar and Emma found themselves way out west with no job and a doubtful future. Burroughs got a job as a railroad policeman which he considered as marking time until something better came along. But nothing did and the couple returned to Chicago. The only job Burroughs could find there was a salesman peddling light bulbs and candy, door-to-door and store-to-store. He was a great reader of want ads. According to Alva in the Saturday Evening Post of July 29, 1939: ï¿½He was constantly obtaining new positions not quite equal to his old ones. Added to that he was always ready to join his own pennilessness to the pennilessness of some other man, and to found a partnership in any naïve dream of avarice.ï¿½ One of the more solid jobs was manager of Sears, Roebuckï¿½s accounting department.

In later years Burroughs said that if sears had given him a raise he believed he deserved he would never have written a word of fiction. But he failed to get the raise and left Sears to go into an operation that might be called doubtful in the extreme. The job was with a publication called System. Burroughsï¿½ task was to write letters of advice to businessmen. On payment of fifty dollars a year for the publication anyone wanting advice from the efficiency experts who ran the magazine could write in and be told how to be a personal or business success. Burroughs delivered, according to Johnsonï¿½s Saturday Evening Post Article, ï¿½words that rumbled with portentous wisdom but were too vague to enable any industrial baron to act on them.ï¿½ Some time later, in 1911, he was employed by a firm that prepared and distributed a product named ï¿½Alcola,ï¿½ a cure for alcoholism. He was in charge of arranging the advertisements for the product, most of which appeared in pulp magazines.

Checking the magazines to be sure that the ads the company paid for really appeared, Burroughs (who claimed that he had never read any kind of fiction) apparently absorbed by osmosis many of the tales of blood and thunder in which fantastic heroes performed unbelievable deeds. Burroughs thought he could write as well or better. His poverty, thwarted ambition, and a deep desire to prove himself drove him to try it, and his incredible rise to fame and fortune began. The first success came when Burroughs sold a story to Thomas Newell Metcalf, editor of All-Story Magazine, for 400 dollars. The story was submitted in two sections. When Metcalf read the first half he wrote Burroughs that he liked it and that if the second part was as good as the first he thought he might use it. If Metcalf had not given him this encouragement Burroughsï¿½ writing career would have ended before it began. He remembered: ï¿½I should never have finished the story and my writing career would have been at an end since I was not writing because of any particular urge to write nor for any particular love of writing.

I was writing because I had a wife and two babies, a combination which does not work well without money.ï¿½ The story was titled by Burroughs ï¿½Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars,ï¿½ and was the first of the Mars stories starring John Carter, an earthman. Metcalf changed the title to ï¿½Under the Moons of Mars,ï¿½ and the story appeared in the magazine as a serial in six parts beginning in February, 1912. It was not published as a book until 1917, with Burroughsï¿½ original title restored, at least partially, as A Princess of Mars. Burroughs adapted the odd pen name of ï¿½Normal Beanï¿½ possibly to assure readers that the author was not really nutty but had a head and mind like any other earthman. In the first All-Story publication, however, some printer, believing the ï¿½Normalï¿½ to be a misprint, spelled it ï¿½Norman,ï¿½ a more normal name.

It was a wry twist; the first of Burroughsï¿½ one hundred and eight titles appeared under a title the author had not selected and was signed with a name that was not only not the authorï¿½s but one he had not chosen. ï¿½Under the Moons of Marsï¿½ was just another weird tale of impossible adventure when it appeared. But later in the same year Tarzan came swinging through the jungle, and Burroughsï¿½ life and fortunes swung right along with him to dizzying heights never before reached by a writer of popular fiction. All-Story Magazine first printed ï¿½Tarzan of the Apesï¿½ complete in the issue of October 1912. Not until 1914 did Tarzan make it between hard covers when A. C. McClurg printed a thousand copies of the story almost as a gesture of recognition to Burroughsï¿½ determination to see his work in book form. In the interval, several newspapers in this country and in England had printed the story as a serial.

The story of how McClurg contracted for the publication of the first Tarzan book has been preserved by David Eisenberg, a retired Near North Sider who joined McClurg on coming out of the army in 1919. He relates that, ï¿½At that time McClurg was reportedly sending Burroughs royalties of about 100,000 dollars annually, and Joe Bray, who was head of the publication department and my immediate boss at McClurg, liked to tell the saga of Burroughsï¿½ success as an example of how perseverance and persistence could pay off. Bray maintained that he would never have signed the 1914 contract for Tarzan of the Apes if it had not been for Burroughsï¿½ own tenacity. Every day for several months the author would come to the retail store that McClurg kept on South Wabash Avenue and report to Herb Gould, the head man ï¿½ or to anyone else from the company who would listen ï¿½ on the mounting popularity that Tarzan was achieving in magazines and newspapers, both here and in England.

His persistent campaign eventually convinced Bray to bring out the thousand-copy edition of the first Tarzan book.ï¿½ From that small beginning the Burroughs empire arose, built of some fifty-five million copies of his books in thirty-six languages, published in every part of the world. That empire of books even has its geographical locations ï¿½ tow towns, one in California and one in Texas, proudly bear the respective names of Tarzana and Tarzan. And then there were the moviesï¿½. Tarzanï¿½s enormous success in the movies and Burroughsï¿½ share in the profits thereof are testimony that he had an almost uncanny gift for seeing where the big money of the future would come from ï¿½ he had the foresight to retain future serial rights to his stories. While the magazine serials were fine and gave him a quick profit, it was hardcover books, reprint and movie rights that gave those lovely royalties that provided the greatest financial reward.

The first check sent to Burroughs by All-Story for a Carter story, had written across it ï¿½for all rights.ï¿½ Burroughs objected to this, and after considerable correspondence the publishers agreed that their rights were confined to the first serial and that all other rights were Burroughsï¿½. They asked him, ï¿½Why all the fuss? What other rights are there?ï¿½ Burroughs replied, ï¿½I donï¿½t know. Movies, maybe?ï¿½ This was at the time when movies were in their infancy. Pioneers ï¿½ David Wark Griffith, Maurice Costello, Lillian Gish ï¿½ were still striving to create an imaginary world with something most people looked on as a toy. But Burroughs early recognized the tremendous appeal that Tarzan would have. Besides, he had plans for the ape-man.

As early as 1913 he and Emma took a trip to California to see if the cinema was ready for Tarzan, but apparently they decided to let the movies get along without the help of the ape-man because a short time later, still in 1913, the couple had an Oak Park address. Burroughsï¿½ imagination and inventive powers, spurred by his drive for success as a writer, produced thousands and thousands of words about the two heroes he had working for him: Tarzan in Africa and John Carter on Mars. Wondrous words they were, too. Although Tarzan was my favorite character, John Carter was given some truly magnificent lines. Carter, a captain in the Confederate Army, raised himself to Mars by the simple but unscientific device of deeply wishing to be there. A swordsman, a fine gentleman and fearless leader, Carter had a style all his own. Declamatory but solid! In The Gods of Mars he speaks these lines: Then my old time spirit reasserted itself. The fighting blood of my Virginia ancestors coursed through my veins. The fierce blood lust and the joy of battle surged over me. The fighting smile that has brought consternation to a thousand foemen touched my lips.

I put the thought of death out of my mind and fell upon my antagonists with fury that those who escaped will remember to their dying day. Surely this can be compared in martial spirit to Homerï¿½s line: Terrible was the clang of the silver bow And ever the funeral pyres of the dead burnt brighter. Or even to the glory of a warhorse described in the Book of Job: He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back form the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage; neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha ha! And he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. John Carter talked like this a lot and was one hell of a fighter with swords, fists, rocks, or most anything that was handy.

But it was hard for us on Chicagoï¿½s North Side to identify ourselves as closely with him as we did with Tarzan. It is hard to emulate a man, earthling though he may be with all kinds of bona fides as a hero, who can jump thirty feet and deal out wallops in mid-air to brutes who are green and have six arms. Besides, Dejah Thoris, Carterï¿½s queen and true love, laid eggs and Carterï¿½s son Carthoris is hatched. No, although Barsoom was a good place to visit, we did not want to live there. Tarzan was the image we liked. Besides, you could be Tarzan all by yourself, up high on a tree branch surveying the jungle that teemed with lions, panthers, elephants, antelope, deer, boar, snakes, friendly natives who wore white hats, unfriendly ones who wore not much of anything, Roman legions, Neanderthal men, ant men, gorillas, hulking anthropoid apes (bigger than gorillas, who walked like men and talked a basic English), and assorted creatures, some of them contemporaries of Tyranosaurus Rex.

What is more, Tarzan was always stumbling over treasure, and that was to his credit. The stamp that years of hard times had left on Burroughs is probably responsible for the riches that came to Tarzan. In Tarzan of the Apes the jungle giant digs up a chest filled with gold coins. In all of the Mars series John Carter is surrounded with walls full of jewels and when anyone of social standing wears clothes at all these are of begemmed supple leather and fur. Everyone sleeps on silks and furs. The title of Burroughsï¿½ twenty-sixth book, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, pretty well foretells the gemencrusted contents. The book was published in 1918 after the author had reached a position of prominence and considerable wealth, but the memory of the lean days lingered and he made up for them in putting scenes of fabulous wealth on paper. What better model for living could a growing boy ask for? A hero who is stronger than a gorilla, courageous, resourceful, and not only Lord of the jungle but a titled lord of the realm.

Yes, Tarzanï¿½s real name, Lord Greystoke, was inherited from his father along with all the other good traits that make up the best of an English lord and blue-blooded gentleman. All of Tarzanï¿½s traits were admirable. He viewed his wealth with commendable calm. He was always temperate, never surly, nor did his heart pound when danger confronted him. We learned many good habits from Tarzan, except table manners ï¿½ his were atrocious. We learned that gallantry to women is an honorable attitude, although the trappings of phony civilization are to be scorned. We learned that swinging from trees builds mighty muscles, or ï¿½thewsï¿½, a word all of Tarzanï¿½s literary captives will recognize immediately. I am sure that Tarzan and his adventures among the arboreal giants accounted in that period for a large part of the popularity of traveling rings and trapezes in playgrounds throughout the nation.

I know I used to spend summer vacations swinging from trapezes and traveling rings in the nearby playground, getting up at ghastly hours to get in some good practice before the crowds of other seekers after truth, virtue, and muscles lined up for their turns. We learned it is a good thing to suffer in silence and not complain when hurt, keeping the upper lip stiff even when an arm was dislocated on the trapeze. We learned: ï¿½It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak, from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating by the light of reason, all the thick clouds in which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself, soaring to the celestial regions, like the sun encompassing with giant strides the vast extent of the universe.ï¿½ Tarzan was, indeed, Jean Jacques Rousseauï¿½s noble savage. Burroughs never went to Africa for background research. All that he knew about the Dark Continent was learned from books, most of them from the Chicago Public Library.

Here too he did the reading of English history necessary to his second story ï¿½The Outlaw of Torn.ï¿½ The novel, about Simon de Montfort and the baronsï¿½ wars of the 13th century, was finished before the author started on the first Tarzan story. Five publishers rejected it. Finally Street and Smith bought it for New-Story Magazine. It appeared in January 1914 with the cover done by N. C. Wyeth, father of Andrew Wyeth. However, ï¿½Outlawï¿½ was not the howling success Tarzan was, and no movie, sweatshirt, or gum wrapper ever picked up the title. Burroughsï¿½ favorite story was not about Tarzan, John Carter, or de Montfort; he favored Billy Byrne, the hero of The Mucker, a product of the streets and alleys of Chicagoï¿½s great West Side.

ï¿½From Halsted Street to Robey and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first nameï¿½ï¿½ Billy Byrne, a mugger, basher, all round bad fellow, wins salvation and riches through the love of a good woman and in the interval spends time in Mexico with the 13th Cavalry, a literary response to Burroughsï¿½ lifelong ambition to be a military man. The Mucker was written in 1913, a year divided between Chicago and California. In that year, according to a chart of word output that Burroughs kept carefully, he wrote 413,000 words, the equivalent of four 300 page books. He kept writing in California while dickering over movie possibilities of Tarzan, but nothing came of those discussions. ON their return from California the Burroughs moved to Oak Park, 6415 Augusta Street, now 415 Augusta according to the Oak Park division of maps and plats.

Other addresses listed in Oak Park telephone directories show them at 700 Linden Avenue in 1917, and in 1918 with an office at 1020 North Boulevard and a residence at 325 North Oak Park Avenue. In Oak Park Burroughs wrote some perfectly awful poetry which appeared in the Chicago Tribune, again over the name of Normal Bean, the pen name he had tried without success to use with his first Mars story in 1912. The Tribune got the name right, but Burroughs never again sought refuge behind a pen name in signing a book or magazine story. Story after story poured from ï¿½his dreadful fluent pen,ï¿½ as Kingsley Amis once termed Burroughsï¿½ amazing productivity. While living in the Chicago suburb Burroughs completed forty novels. His removal from Chicago to California where he was to live for the rest of his life, was the occasion for a farewell banquet given him by the White Paper Club, an organization of writers, publishers, editors, and other forms of the genus bookman.

It is obvious from the sentiments expressed at this banquet that Edgar Rice Burroughs was honored among men in the trade as a friend and good fellow as well as the most productive and highly successful of any Chicago author. Newspaper accounts of the banquet quote humorous and affectionate remarks of the speakers. Emerson Hough, author of several well-known books, including The Covered Wagon; Frank Reilly, publisher; Hiram Moe Green, editor of Womenï¿½s World; Vincent Starrett, author and poet, were among those who bade Burroughs fond farewells. The elaborate menu printed especially for the banquet is now a collectorï¿½s item. It was illustrated by J. Allen St. John, Burroughsï¿½ illustrator, and is a prize item in the collection of Stanleigh Vinson of Mansfield, Ohio, one of the high priests in the Burroughs sect. Vinson and over a thousand others are members of The Burroughs Bibliophiles, an international fan club started in Pittsburgh at the Science Fiction Convention in 1960.

Through correspondence, yearly meetings, and fanzines (fan magazines) club members keep abreast of all new developments in the Burroughs legend and refresh their allegiance to Tarzan, John Carter and the other characters, beasts, and places that Burroughs wrought. With drawings, maps, glossaries of Burroughs-invented vocabularies, theories on the location of Tarzanï¿½s gold vault in Opar, and even a study of Burroughsï¿½ use of the semi-colon, the literature of Burroughs studies accumulates. Vernell Coriell, one of the original founders, now heads the group in Kansas City, Missouri. Stan Vinsonï¿½s collection is perhaps the most extensive of any, and has supplied much of the biographical and graphic material for this article. Other information came from A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by the Reverend Henry Hardy Heins, pastor of St. Marks Lutheran Church, Albany, New York. This work might well be one of the most complete bibliographies of one manï¿½s work ever assembled.

It contains entire listings of all the stories, manuscript material, illustrations, and advertisements, as well as several subject indexes of Burroughsï¿½ work. Heins also gives a short biographical note on the remarkable St. John, Burroughsï¿½ illustrator. King of the bungle: why Tarzan will never be OK | Film | The Guardian Movies King of the bungle: why Tarzan will never be OK Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character has inspired more than 50 films, but their out-of-date approach to the ‘dark continent’ leaves them fatally flawed Samuel L Jackson and Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan. Photograph: Jonathan Olley/AP Wednesday 29 June 2016 12.33 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 29 June 2016 13.15 EDT The Legend of Tarzan review – an inherently problematic remake Read more All of you whingeing about the Ghostbusters remake, the Independence Day sequel and 50 Marvel movies coming out in the next year can pipe down now. The new Tarzan movie is out.

There have been so many Tarzan reboots, it makes Spider-Man look like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Since the invention of the motion picture, there have been more than 50 films based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan character. And I’m not counting documentaries, unlicensed works, TV movies, or foreign language adaptations. If you want to lament Hollywood’s supposed lack of originality, start with the first Tarzan theatrical sequel from 1918, which came out the same year as the original. I suppose Tarzan was the Iron Man of his time – appearing in every movie as a matter of course. He’s certainly not the Iron Man of this time, since that’s, well, Iron Man. In the pantheon of enduring literary characters, why is a guy in a loincloth raised by gorillas so beloved by the people who write the checks in the entertainment industry? If you think characters like Batman and Superman are hard to relate to, try this: the child of English aristocrats is orphaned and brought up in the jungle by a pack of African gorillas. The gorillas name him Tarzan, which means “white skin” in Burrough’s made-up gorilla language.

In addition to being able to understand gorilla-speak, Tarzan develops superhuman athletic abilities and teaches himself to read. When European travellers (including his soon-to-be wife, Jane Porter) discover him, they teach him English and French. Tarzan is the strongest, cleverest person in the history of the world. If someone had invented the term “Mary Sue” in 1912, it could have applied to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan. One might not be able to relate to a character who can swing from vines, talk to animals, and teach himself to read quicker than Rey learned how to wield a lightsaber, but it’s certainly fun to imagine being that person. Like another great English literary hero, James Bond, Tarzan also taps into latent notions of colonialism and Great Britain’s cautiously cozying up to what it considered more exotic cultures. While James Bond is dispatched by the British government to defend the crown and in the process has sexual relations with women from every culture imaginable, Tarzan is dropped into the jungle and becomes a part of his surroundings. Bond pops into places like Turkey and Jamaica and leaves after a job well done.

Tarzan grows up in an exotic place and, despite his highborn lineage, chooses to stay in that place and reject the social order so he can fight mutants with telepathy. In the DNA of the character is the idea that a clever white man can bring order to the “dark continent” through his own brand of clearly delineated, culturally specific morality. In the DNA of the character is the idea that a clever white man can bring order to the “dark continent” That’s not exactly the most modern idea of a hero. But it was far more common in the early days of heroic pulp fiction. Allan Quartermain begat Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, who begat Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, the Phantom, the Shadow, Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane. And eventually, they gave us Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the contemporary superhero. There have been numerous attempts to launch the classic pulp heroes into feature film franchises akin to today’s mega-blockbuster series. Billy Zane played the Phantom. Alec Baldwin turned the Shadow into a masterpiece of art deco camp. John Carter of Mars was portrayed by the guy from Friday Night Lights.

What people fail to realize is that these characters are intrinsically, hopelessly dated. In order to launch a new Tarzan series, the director David Yates and the writers Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer have introduced the political realities of the era into the story. Rather than have Tarzan find lost cities or scrap over buried treasure, they’ve made him a diplomat in the Congo. Christoph Waltz portrays the villain, a greedy Belgian who wants to sell Tarzan for a cache of diamonds. Tarzan encounters African tribes and Samuel L Jackson – the go-to actor for any film that wants to make sure black people buy tickets – is shoehorned in as a real-life historical figure named George Washington Williams. So, a story that’s usually about Europeans conquering the untamed wilderness now has a few more black people in it. Does that make Tarzan less anachronistic? No, because what’s really mysterious about Africa in an era when I can watch a safari on YouTube ? Throw the massive success of The Jungle Book in my face and I will retort that The Jungle Book is a Disney-approved remake of the animated film, which plenty of parents are still nostalgic for because of Disney’s perpetual promotion of its cartoon back catalog.

Perhaps there are millions of fans itching for this Tarzan film who loved Casper Van Dien and Jane March in Tarzan and the Lost City, Christopher Lambert’s 1984 film Greystoke, or the one where Tarzan goes deaf from a bomb blast. (It’s called Tarzan’s Deadly Silence , which sounds like the name of a Lifetime original movie.) For some literary creations, it’s possible to hip them up a bit for the iPhone generation. Sherlock Holmes gets Robert Downey Jr and a few slow-motion fight scenes and Bob’s your uncle. Holmes is just a really witty guy with no social skills and a minor opiate addiction. In a different time, he might have been the CEO of a tech company in San Francisco. Tarzan’s a dude who lives in a treehouse and talks to apes. He lives in Africa and has no black friends. He’s maybe not the first 20th century hero to appropriate another culture, but he’s the most successful at it. It’s an idea that gave birth to Dances with Wolves and Avatar. To borrow a term I use very, very rarely, Tarzan is not “woke”.

He’s easily the least woke fictional character other than C Thomas Howell in the movie Soul Man . I don’t care if you put the entire cast of Empire in Tarzan. I’m not interested. Tarzan creator's heir protected the legacy - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections Obituaries / Danton Burroughs, 1944 - 2008 Tarzan creator's heir protected the legacy May 15, 2008 |Valerie J. Nelson | Times Staff Writer Danton Burroughs, who spent his life marketing and protecting the work of his grandfather, Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, died May 1 at his home in Tarzana, the San Fernando Valley community named after his ancestor's most famous fictional character. He was 63. Burroughs, who had been battling Parkinson's disease, died of heart failure a day after a fire at his home destroyed a room filled with family memorabilia. The cause of the fire is under investigation, said Alex Cornelius, a family spokesman.

Bill Hillman, an editor of Edgar Rice Burroughs-related websites, told The Times that "it was heartbreaking for Dan to put his life's work into preserving material for the family and see it go up in flames." The day he died, Danton Burroughs was to be named chairman of Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., the company his grandfather formed in 1923 to merchandise his abundant fiction, which included dozens of novels and short stories. For The Record Los Angeles Times Friday, May 16, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 50 words Type of Material: Correction Burroughs obituary: The obituary in Thursday's California section of Danton Burroughs, who guarded the legacy of his grandfather, Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, said that Tarzan of the Apes first appeared as a short story in 1911. The character debuted in 1912 in a short novel published in All-Story Magazine. "My grandfather was always smart, taking care of trademarks and copyrights and going after infringers," Burroughs told The Times in 1990.

In 1972, Burroughs became an officer and director of the family business, overseeing the company from a Mission-style bungalow on Ventura Boulevard that his grandfather built in 1927. The office is on the northern edge of 550 acres that Edgar Rice Burroughs named Tarzana Ranch in 1919. The community began going by the Tarzana name in the 1920s. Profits from the creation of the fantasy character Tarzan of the Apes, which first appeared in a short story in 1911, allowed Edgar Rice Burroughs to purchase the land from the estate of Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the second publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Decades after the author's death in 1950, revenue from Tarzan-related products continued to roll in as Danton Burroughs negotiated the sale of Tarzan rights for feature films, video games, comic books and such disparate products as stuffed animals, sleepwear, jackknives and multivitamins. He also carefully protected the source of the family fortune, suing anyone who used the Tarzan name or likeness without a license, according to a 1999 Times story.

The business is "a multimillion-dollar corporation," Burroughs said in 1985 in The Times. "We don't tell anyone exactly how much money is involved. It's a privately held corporation, and we like to keep a low profile." Within the business, the gregarious Burroughs was especially valued as a historical archivist, said Jim Sullos, company president. "Dan had the most intimate knowledge of literature that his grandpa wrote," Sullos told The Times this week. "He could pull out of historical documents things people didn't even know existed." One of Danton's goals was to market some of Edgar Rice Burroughs' other works, especially the tales of John Carter, who stars in a series of novels that take place on Mars, Sullos said. Danton named his daughters Dejah and Llana Jane for two princesses his grandfather invented for his fictional Mars world; the Jane was for Danton's mother, Jane Ralston Burroughs. Burroughs was born June 21, 1944, in Los Angeles and grew up in Tarzana. In 1972, he earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Cal State Northridge.

His father, John Coleman Burroughs, was best known for illustrating the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He also was a photographer who documented Los Angeles as early as the 1920s. Many of his negatives burned in the April 30 fire at Danton's home, said Gerald Fecht, president of the Museum of the San Fernando Valley. A supporter of the Valley museum, Danton also helped found the Tarzana Museum and contributed many artifacts to its collection, which is housed in the Tarzana Community and Cultural Center. "I don't really expect to meet anyone like Danton again," Fecht said. "He had a sense of wonder, a sense of joy . . . he was absolutely a splendid person. When you were with him, it felt like vacation." An inveterate collector, Danton showcased his flea-market finds and other collectibles in his hillside home. Outside, his house resembled a mini-castle but inside it was more like a major antique store, friends said. Among his thousands of collectibles were jukeboxes and pinball machines, sheet music, street lamps and many literary works.

In the fire, Danton lost treasured pocket watches and antique marbles but he was devastated by the loss of so much memorabilia related to his father and grandfather, Hillman said. "He felt, and rightfully so, that the Burroughs legacy was entrusted to his keeping," Hillman wrote in an online tribute. "And this disaster seemed to prove how vulnerable and fleeting such a legacy could be." He is survived by Linda, his wife of 28 years, and his daughters. Burroughs is also survived by a brother, John Ralston Burroughs, and a sister, Dian Burroughs. A service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Tarzana Community and Cultural Center, 19130 Ventura Blvd., Tarzana. Instead of flowers, the family suggests donating to the Danton Burroughs Memorial Fund at Parkinson's Resource Organization, www .parkinsonsresource.org. -- Edgar Rice Burroughs Edgar Rice Burroughs The Land that Time Forgot Read by Ralph Snelson The Land That Time Forgot is a science fiction novel, the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Caspak trilogy.

His working title for the story was… A Princess of Mars Read by LibriVox Volunteers Part One of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars-Series. Easy, swank, pulp read about an omnipotent gentleman teleported to Mars, finding an outlandi… Tarzan of the Apes Read by Mark F. Smith Tarzan of the Apes is Burroughs’ exciting, if improbable, story of an English lord, left by the death of his stranded parents in the hands o… The Gods of Mars Read by JD Weber The Gods of Mars is a 1918 Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, the second of his famous Barsoom series.It can be said that the nove… The Warlord of Mars Read by JD Weber Warlord of Mars is a Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, the third of his famous Barsoom series. John Carter continues his quest to … The People that Time Forgot Read by Ralph Snelson The People that Time Forgot is a science fiction novel, the second of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Caspak trilogy.

The first novel ended with the h… The Chessmen of Mars Read by Tom Weiss The Chessmen of Mars is a science fiction novel by the mental sword and physical pen wielding author Edgar Rice Burroughs. It the fifth inst… The Return of Tarzan Read by Ralph Snelson The novel picks up where Tarzan of the Apes left off. The ape man, feeling rootless in the wake of his noble sacrifice of his prospects of w… At the Earth's Core Read by LibriVox Volunteers This is the first book in the Pellucidar series. Pellucidar is a fictional Hollow Earth milieu invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series… Thuvia, Maid of Mars Read by Scott Merrill In this novel the focus shifts from John Carter, Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thoris of Helium, protagonists of the first three books in the s… The Beasts of Tarzan Read by James Christopher This is the third of Burrough's Tarzan novels.

Originally serialized in All-Story Cavalier magazine in 1914, the novel was first published i… Out of Time's Abyss Read by Ralph Snelson Out of Time's Abyss is a science fiction novel, the third of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Caspak trilogy. In this conclusion, the mysteries of the … A Princess of Mars (Version 3) Read by Thomas A. Copeland John Carter is mysteriously conveyed to Mars, where he discovers two intelligent species continually embroiled in warfare. Although he is a … Pellucidar Read by LibriVox Volunteers Pellucidar is a fictional "Hollow Earth" milieu invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series of action adventure stories. The sto… Tarzan the Terrible Read by Don W. Jenkins In the previous novel, during the early days of World War I, Tarzan discovered that his wife Jane was not killed in a fire set by German tro… The Son of Tarzan Read by Ralph Snelson This is the fourth of Burrough's Tarzan novels.

Alexis Paulvitch, a henchman of Tarzan's now-deceased enemy, Nikolas Rokoff, survived his en… A Princess of Mars (version 2) Read by Mark Nelson John Carter, an American Civil War veteran, goes prospecting in Arizona and, when set upon by Indians, is mysteriously transported to Mars, … Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar Read by Ralph Snelson This is the fifth of Burrough's Tarzan novels.Tarzan finds himself bereft of his fortune and resolves to return to the jewel-room of Opar, l… The Mad King Read by Delmar H Dolbier Shades of The Prisoner of Zenda! All our old friends are here—the young king, the usurping uncle and his evil henchman, the beautiful prince… Tarzan the Untamed Read by LibriVox Volunteers This book follows Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar chronologically. The action is set during World War I.

While away from his plantation home i… Jungle Tales of Tarzan Read by Ralph Snelson Jungle Tales of Tarzan is a collection of twelve loosely-connected short stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, comprising the sixth book … The Outlaw of Torn Read by LibriVox Volunteers The story is set in 13th century England and concerns the fictitious outlaw Norman of Torn, who purportedly harried the country during the p… The Gods of Mars - (version 2) Read by Thomas A. Copeland In this second volume of the Barsoom series, John Carter returns to Mars to learn that his heroic effort to salvage the atmosphere plant sav… The Gods of Mars - (version 3) Read by Mark Nelson After John Carter's arrival, a boat of Green Martians on the River Iss are ambushed by the previously unknown Plant Men. The lone survivor i… Read by Ralph Snelson Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Jack London / H.H. Knibbs-inspired, selfless, poetry-spouting, hobo character, Bridge, makes another appearance in the… The Warlord of Mars (version 2) Read by Thomas A.

Copeland In this third installment of the adventures of John Carter on Mars, our hero labors under sentence of death (for having returned from the la… The Lost Continent (Beyond Thirty) Read by Lucy Lo Faro Originally published under the title of Beyond Thirty.The novel, set in the year 2137, was heavily influenced by the events of World War I. … The Chessmen of Mars (version 3) Read by Mark Nelson In the fifth book in the Barsoom series, Tara of Helium, daughter of John Carter, becomes lost in an unknown area of Mars when her single-se… Thuvia, Maid of Mars (version 3) Read by Mark Nelson The fourth book of the Barsoom series, Thuvia, Maid of Mars takes up the story of Thuvia, now Princess of Ptarth, and Carthoris, son of John… The Efficiency Expert Read by Delmar H Dolbier Our hero, Jimmy Torrance, Jr., has a hard time finding suitable employment after a brilliant (athletically, at least) college career, despit… Thuvia, Maid of Mars (version 2) Read by Thomas A.

Copeland John Carter's son, Carthoris, falls in love with his father's true friend, Thuvia of Ptarth, but she has been promised to another and is kid… The Warlord of Mars (version 3) Read by Mark Nelson After the horrendous battle at the end of the previous book, which ended with the destruction of the religion of Issus, John Carter's wife a… Pellucidar (version 2) Read by Mark Nelson David Innes and his captive, a member of the reptilian Mahar master race of the interior world of Pellucidar, return from the surface world … At the Earth's Core (version 2) Read by Mark Nelson David Innes is a mining heir who finances the experimental "iron mole," an excavating vehicle designed by his elderly inventor fri… The Chessmen of Mars (version 2) Read by Thomas A. Copeland Tara of Helium, John Carter's second child, is nearly as beautiful as her mother, Deja Thoris, and as independent-minded as her father.

Thes… Out of Time's Abyss (version 2) Read by Lucy Lo Faro Out of Time’s Abyss is an Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, the third of his Caspak trilogy. The sequence was first published in B… Book Review of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review By Jason Haslam (March 1, 2011) 3 Comments October 2012 will mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the first appearance of the eponymous hero of Tarzan of the Apes, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and originally published as a complete novel in that month’s issue of the well-known pulp publication, All-Story Magazine. Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs’ second publication with All-Story, would rocket him to fame, especially after an expanded version was published as a book (Burroughs’ first) in 1914 by McClurg.

More than any other of Burroughs’ many creations, Tarzan has become a staple of popular culture, a process which began almost immediately: 1918 marked the first version of the novel in the relatively new forum of popular cinema, a film that would be one of the first to gross over one million dollars. Beyond film, Tarzan would form the basis of a radio show in the 1930s, and would spawn one of the first serial dramatic comic strips, the other being “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” both of which debuted on the same day in January 1929. As the twentieth century steamed ahead, Tarzan found fame in television, comic books, cartoons, songs, lunchboxes, and even on the map: Burroughs bought a ranch and named it after his character, and over the years it developed into the town Tarzana, California. All of this is not to forget that Burroughs eventually published twenty-six Tarzan books, to which other authors (both authorized and not) added after Burroughs’ death in 1950. It would be a daunting, and likely pointless, task to try to explain the why of Tarzan’s popularity.

I say “pointless” (even though I venture into an explanation below) because, while many of us will have a clear picture of Tarzan in our heads, the character is in fact more slippery than one may first think. Burroughs’ own Tarzan moves from being the superman who was raised by “anthropoid apes” after being orphaned on the shores of equatorial western Africa, to being more or less an international gentleman spy, to being briefly replaced by his son, to exploring the underworld of Burroughs’ other series set beneath the Earth’s crust. Beyond Burroughs’ version, while most popular culture Tarzans share the heritage of being raised in Africa by apes and being suspicious of civilization, the similarities between Burroughs’ original creation and its cultural descendants often end there. Tarzan’s well-known clipped speech pattern, for example, is the creation of the films; by the end of the original novel, Tarzan speaks flawless English and French, and had earlier taught himself how to read and write in English.

So the “why” of Tarzan’s appeal is less of a concern, it seems to me, than the “how”: the character functions almost as a cultural prism, in which the concerns, anxieties, desires, and tastes of particular times and places are encapsulated, only to be refracted in such a way as to make us look at that context in a different perspective. When I think of Tarzan, I often think of one of his later, perhaps distant descendants: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the beginning of each episode of that television series, the voiceover intones that “Into every generation a slayer is born”; well, into every generation, or location, a Tarzan likewise seems to be born. Burroughs’ original Tarzan, as he appeared in that first novel, embodies several of the aspirations, tensions, and failings of the early twentieth-century Unites States. Born to Lord and Lady Greystoke after they were marooned on the shores of equatorial western Africa by a group of cutthroat mutineers, the rightful inheritor of the title ‘Lord Greystoke’ is orphaned and subsequently raised by apes in the jungle.

His struggles to survive, combined with what Burroughs describes as his “heredity,” lead Tarzan to develop into a “god-like” specimen of humanity, who, when confronted with members of “civilization” is left agog at their weakness and stupidity. Like Eliot’s also popular (though not quite as popular) “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Tarzan of the Apes bemoans the stultifying effects of modern civilization. Written at roughly the same moment when Baden-Powell was forming the Boy Scouts, the American government was setting aside lands for national parks, and the Audubon Society was created, the novel refracts a national longing for an unspoiled nature, one that will, nearly mystically perhaps, save the nation from the corruption and decadence of a newly urban lifestyle. Like the Boy Scouts’ retreat to nature, Tarzan’s is also a gendered one, an attempt to recapture a masculinity that was supposedly disappearing beneath the left-over Victorian niceties of nineteenth-century America and the excesses of the early twentieth.

Burroughs makes this argument for nature and manliness explicit in a set of comparisons between Tarzan and his cousin, who had unwittingly usurped Tarzan’s aristocratic title. After watching the first human he sees cook meat, Tarzan, who “would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner,” gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return. And then Lord Greystoke wiped his greasy fingers upon his naked thighs and took up the trail of Kulonga, the son of Mbonga, the king; while in far-off London another Lord Greystoke, the younger brother of the real Lord Greystoke’s father, sent back his chops to the club’s chef because they were underdone, and when he had finished his repast he dipped his finger-ends into a silver bowl of scented water and dried them upon a piece of snowy damask.

A similar comparison is made when Tarzan kills Sabor, the lioness (who was Sabor, the tiger, in the magazine publication, which Burroughs changed after readers pointed out that there were no tigers in Africa…): With swelling breast, he placed a foot upon the body of his powerful enemy, and throwing back his fine young head, roared out the awful challenge of the victorious bull ape. The forest echoed to the savage and triumphant pæan. Birds fell still, and the larger animals and beasts of prey slunk stealthily away, for few there were of all the jungle who sought for trouble with the great anthropoids. And in London another Lord Greystoke was speaking to his kind in the House of Lords, but none trembled at the sound of his soft voice. The tie between Tarzan, the natural world, and manliness became one of the most enduring of the character’s associations. This “back to nature” movement and its various cultural connections to Tarzan are perhaps best exemplified in the famous experiment undertaken by Joseph Knowles.

In his Alone in the Wilderness, published in 1913, the year after Tarzan’s appearance in All-Story, Knowles describes how he lived alone in the woods with no civilized accoutrements–he even entered the woods naked. Knowles, like the Scouts and others in the various streams of the “back to nature” movements, thus echoes Tarzan of the Apes’ statements about the threat posed to manhood by civilization: Knowles was called by some the “Maine Tarzan.” Of course, the other central cultural association of the original Tarzan is even more pernicious – and vicious. The novel has been read, as have the later films, as lauding not just a general “manliness,” but specifically one that at the least flirts with an Anglo-Saxon, white supremacist masculinity, as many critics have noted.

“Tarzan” in Burroughs’ invented ape-language does mean “white skin,” and Tarzan describes himself to the first white people he sees as “the killer of many black men.” Tarzan is here again serving as both a receptacle of and lens for reading his historical context: Tarzan’s violence towards black Africans finds its echoes in the racism and violence directed at African Americans at this time. The NAACP was formed shortly before the publication of the novel, and was actively engaged in the opening decades of the century with combating the massive number of lynchings taking place across the US, and certainly the notion of white supremacy was explicit in the then-popular eugenics movements and associations. I mention these contexts explicitly not to excuse the racist characterizations that find their expression in Burroughs’ novel (as Tarzan apologists would do), but to show the ways in which the original character both provides the foundation for, and stands against, his appropriation as a–perhaps the—modern popular embodiment of the archetype of the hero. Instead of my prism metaphor, we could read Burroughs’ Tarzan as an ideological shell, into which many different historical specifics have been poured.

And this makes him a fluid figure, who can be (partially) emptied of that history and refilled in different contexts. Even Burroughs’ drawing of the character would change over the several decades of his writing (writing that was contemporary with many of the other cultural Tarzans), and while the first novel does contain certain racist stereotypes in abundance, it also makes an anti-imperialist argument. While I would (and have) argued that Tarzan–in what we can call generally “cultural memory”–never manages fully to escape his historical origin (and his racist and sexist connotations), over the decades-long course of Burroughs’ series and in the wider realm of popular culture the character has refracted the light of many different periods and places. Tarzan has looked forward to certain environmentalist causes, fighting against illegal hunters in, for example, the 1958 film Tarzan and the Trappers, and in both the novels and the films he has responded to global political turmoil, including fighting in WWII and battling communists during the Cold War.

In the film Tarzan Triumphs (1943), for example, the most famous screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, trounces the Nazis who have invaded the jungle, at one point uttering the famous line, “Now, Tarzan make war!” Released two years after America’s entry into the war, the film offers comedic propaganda, with Tarzan’s robust masculinity once again pitted against a decadent civilization, but this time that antagonist is represented by the Nazis, who are both vicious and ridiculous (at the end of the film, Tarzan’s chimp, Cheeta–who does not appear in the novels–manages to contact a Nazi unit over the radio, and a German officer mistakes Cheeta for Hitler). Other versions of Tarzan have appeared around the globe. Eli Eshed has documented the popularity of Tarzan in Israel, where a series of pulp pamphlets featuring variations on Burroughs’ figure was published between the 1930s and 60s. And James R. Nesteby has traced Tarzan’s appearance in several Arabic publications. He’s also been a romantic lead in Bollywood productions.

One can certainly read into the proliferation of Hollywood Tarzans both in North America and around the globe a form of American pop-culture takeover, where American film and other mass-marketed icons force out local traditions. Others may see the development of multiple global Tarzans as a form of pop-culture transcendence, where Tarzan can escape his background and seamlessly fit into other situations. I would argue, instead, that the “origin myth” that Burroughs gives to Tarzan–an orphaned child, raised outside of human contact–lends a certain emptiness to the figure that allows him to be filled in with a variety of both political and personal fantasies. This theory is being tested again, with a new series of young adult novels scheduled to begin publication in 2011, in which Tarzan is reportedly recast as a young environmentalist: quite the transformation from the first screen Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who killed an actual lion on set. But can Tarzan ever escape his own origins in early twentieth-century America, a creation soaked in the racial, gender, and other politics of its time?

When Disney recreated Tarzan for an animated film in 1999, they tried to avoid the issue of race by simply avoiding the representation of black people living in Africa altogether, an erasure that brought condemnation from many. The continual reproduction of Tarzan can allow us to trace the similarities and differences between different cultural traditions around the globe, or to examine the social changes in Western cultures over the course of the twentieth century, even as it speaks to the dominance of American popular culture. Tarzan can also, though, remind us of the ways in which those cultural differences are still too often ignored or attacked, or that the changes to North American society since Tarzan’s creation, while undeniably great, have not been as thorough as they may at first appear. But what the popularity of this character undeniably shows us is the way in which such pop-culture icons can become a part of a wide variety of people’s intellectual and emotional lives. As one reader wrote to All-Story Magazine after the novel’s first publication: “When I had finished the article I felt the keenest sorrow for Mr.

Burroughs’s ‘Tarzan of the Apes.’ No–he had become my Tarzan.” ____ Jason Haslam is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, and current President of the Canadian Association for American Studies. His research interests include prison writing, science fiction, and the gothic, among other topics. He is the author of Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives, and has edited Constance Lytton’s 1914 suffragette autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.

Related: In Paperback: Tarzan of the Apes A handsome new paperback of the book that gave birth to a multi-million dollar industry: the modern-day myth that is "Tarzan of the Apes." Book Review: Tarzan and the City of Gold When one comics legend stepped down from the "Tarzan" newspaper comic strip nearly a century ago, another comics legend - Burne Hogarth - took over, and "Tarzan in the City of Gold" is Titan Books' first lavish reprint of Hogarth's run on the title Book Review: Tarzan – The Centennial Celebration Edgar Rice Burroughs' legendary Ape Man gets a comprehensive visual tribute fit for the king of the jungle

Question: Which fictional jungle dwelling character was invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Answer: Tarzan