Revisiting Tarzan of the Apes

I'm enjoying Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes for the first time since I was a teenager. I stumbled across the first American edition at a local thrift store. I gave it to my oldest son, but he's only five, so I've appropriated the thing and am enjoying a trip down memory lane. I read dozens (are there dozens? I feel that there are) of titles from the series that Tarzan of the Apes kicked off when I was a fourteen-year-old kid stocking the shelves at the now defunct Arlington Books in Arlington, Massachusetts, right off of Mass Ave. This was the same shop where I discovered the joy of centuries-old leather bounds, and The Joy of Sex. I should write a Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana type memoir about those days...Tarzan would fit right in.

This primordial primeval progenitor of the series is certainly a virile story, although the mix of cultural Darwinism and religiosity is unsettling; I ran into that in even bigger doses in a trashy sort of adventure romance geared more for females I recently read, penned in the same era. Sins of our fathers, and what-not.

Having gotten the confessions concerning philosophical outlook and literary quality out of the way by paragraph two, I've just gotta say what I sat down at the computer to say: huzzah for rip-roaring adventure yarns! Another book to add to the boy's adventure shelf I plan to keep growing in the next few years.

I might even give in to temptation and read some of the sequels to Tarzan. Volumes with such tantalizing titles as The Son of Tarzan and Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

And as a nod to this website's primary lens through which it views and discusses manliness, included in this post please find a pic of our man Edgar Rice enjoying his morning paper and a little puff from his pipe.

"As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people. "