Tarzan and the Myth of the Feral Child

An English child, orphaned in the African jungle, is raised by apes and grows into a lord of the wild — and then meets civilization, and must decide which world is truly his. Tarzan of the Apes is one of the most famous stories ever told, retold in films and comics beyond counting, and it taps one of humanity’s oldest and deepest fantasies.

The feral child — the human raised by beasts — runs from Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, through the jungle boy of Kipling’s Jungle Books, to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ape-man. The fantasy endures because it asks a real question: what is human nature underneath the manners and the clothes? Tarzan is noble, strong, and free precisely because he was raised outside society — Burroughs’s answer to the age-old dream that the natural man is better than the civilized one, that we have been diminished, not improved, by our comforts.

Read now, the books show their age — their assumptions about race and empire are of 1912 and must be read with open eyes. But the core myth is undying, and Burroughs told it with a conviction that made millions believe. Like John Carter of Mars, Tarzan proves the pulps could plant myths that outlive their own prose.

This edition gathers the Tarzan collection — thirteen novels.

Read the Tarzan of the Apes Collection →