Tarzan of the Apes

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

190 pages, Hardcover

Published January 30, 2026

About the author

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.

Reviews

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's get the propane moments out of the way at the start: No, a great ape/gorilla couldn't raise a human child to his teen years. No, a person who has never read a language could teach himself to read and comprehend and understand and even use a dictionary. No a man couldn't win a fight with a gorilla or lion. Lions are not jungle animals, but plains animals and so many other things like that in Tarzan of the Apes.

But scientific accuracy was never part of pulp magazines. Although, in his later years, Burroughs read Scientific American. And Burroughs was a pulp fiction writer through and through, along with Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and a host of other writers who shaped and influenced American popular literature for the past century.

I give ERB five stars because he was able to capture the imagination of his readers and hold their attention. He wasn't tryiing to create great literature. He was trying to tell a fun story. As none other than Gore Vidal has noted about Burroughs, he wasn't lettered, but he told a good story and wrote action scenes with the best of them.

The Tarzan books are the books that turned me into a full-fledged reader and led me to Dickens and Dante. For that alone, I'll be forever grateful.