Tarzan of the Apes was first published in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story magazine, then in book form by A.C. McClurg & Co. in June 1914. The novel tells the origin story of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke — the infant son of a marooned English nobleman, orphaned in the West African jungle and raised by a fictional species of great apes called the Mangani. The child grows into a man of extraordinary physical power and intelligence who teaches himself to read from books left in his parents’ cabin, encounters other humans for the first time as an adult, and must navigate the collision between his jungle upbringing and his aristocratic inheritance.
Burroughs wrote the novel in a few weeks, drawing on no personal experience of Africa or apes. He was a thirty-six-year-old failed businessman — pencil-sharpener salesman, light-bulb dealer, failed gold miner — who had never published fiction. The story came from pure imagination and a shrewd sense of what pulp magazine readers wanted: adventure, romance, exotic settings, and a hero who embodied both savage vitality and aristocratic refinement.
The novel’s success was immediate and enormous. It generated twenty-three sequels (the last published posthumously in 1965), launched Burroughs’s career as the most commercially successful pulp writer of the early twentieth century, and created a character whose cultural penetration exceeds that of almost any fictional figure of the twentieth century. Tarzan has appeared in over forty films, numerous television series, comic strips, radio programs, and merchandise of every conceivable kind.
The book’s racial politics are deeply problematic by contemporary standards — the African characters are presented through grotesque racist stereotypes, and the novel’s premise rests on the assumption that an English aristocrat’s innate superiority would manifest even without civilization. These elements cannot be separated from the novel’s appeal in its own era: it confirmed white supremacist fantasies for a readership that took them for granted.
Collecting Tarzan of the Apes
First edition (A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1914): Red cloth binding with gold lettering. Acorn device on copyright page indicates first edition.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $5,000–$15,000
- Very good/very good: $2,000–$5,000
- Good/good: $800–$2,000
- Magazine first (All-Story, Oct 1912): $10,000–$30,000