![]() ![]() But surely no one could better exemplify what TR called “the strenuous life” than Burroughs’s new vine-swinging, lasso-waving, knife-wielding hero. In May of 1898, in between some odd-jobbing and work as a ranch hand, Burroughs had applied for a spot in the Rough Riders and been turned down by Roosevelt himself. Tarzan was published in The All-Story magazine for October 1912, just a few months after Americans had thrilled to Jim Thorpe’s Olympic feats in Stockholm, and during the final weeks of Theodore Roosevelt’s bumptious Bull Moose campaign to recapture the presidency. Burroughs’s instincts quickly proved correct, and after selling a tale called “Under the Moons of Mars,” he started composing Tarzan of the Apes: “I wrote it in longhand,” he recalled years later, “on the backs of old letterheads and odd pieces of paper.” The mockingly neutral tone (and not terribly accurate summary) could hardly matter to a man who had failed at gold-dredging, accountancy, mail-order sales, and a host of other ventures by the time he was thirty-five and, close to desperation, decided he “could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so” than those he saw in the fiction magazines of his day. Meanwhile the ape man has been educated in the culture of his kind, and he finally proves that he has a soul as well as superhuman strength.īurroughs was surely unfazed by this. The scene then shifts to Wisconsin, where the heroine is rescued from more perils. He also plays the part of instructor to a scientific expedition. One day a white woman is put ashore from a ship, and the ape man falls in love with her, and rescues her from many perils. When the child has become a man he possesses the habits, the language, and the great strength of the apes. A herd of giant apes invade the cabin, kill Lord Greystoke, take away the child, and rear it as their own. Lord Greystoke and his wife are marooned on the African jungle coast, build a cabin, and become accustomed to the wild life there. particular selection”-a note of caution that veers toward alarm in the editors’ capsule assessment of Burroughs’s recent creation: “The author has evidently tried to see how far he could go without exceeding the limits of possibility.” The plot description that followed made it clear that, “possibility” aside, plausibility had certainly been breached: The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper’s Book Review included Tarzan of the Apes among “One Hundred Books for Summer Reading.” Having asked publishers to supply the hundred titles, the Review editors did “not pretend to say what consideration has inspired each. ![]()
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